It was fabulous having the chance to catch-up with Dr. Marie Rarieya during one of her visits to Nairobi for a workshop! Marie graduated with a PhD from the Science and Technology Studies department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before going to Japan for the prestigious JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellowship at the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies.  Now she works at Agra-Alliance in Accra, Ghana.

Marie is originally from Nairobi and has previously worked in Gigiri for the World Agroforestry Centre; she gave me some helpful tips and recommendations before I came out to work in Gigiri at UNON.

Today a message came through on the SKAT listserv (Science, Knowledge and Technology subsection of the American Sociological Association) that was written by Laurel Smith-Doerr.  She encouraged us to write to our U.S. representatives and senators in support of the human sciences because the appropriations committee wants to cut the Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate out of the National Science Foundation.

Below I have posted the letter that I wrote and forwarded to my U.S. representative and senators.

I am so excited that the triple session that Tolu, Kevin, Denver and I have worked on has been accepted at the Society for the Social Studies of Science annual meeting in November 2011!  Cleveland Rocks!
We have a spectacular line-up of scholarly work, please see the abstracts here, 
Here is the KFM triple session abstract:
Knowledge from the margins is of longstanding interest to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Modern technoscientific knowledge is typically understood to be produced for patent, profit, and/or its liberal virtues. The early focus on innovative knowledge resulted primarily in elite histories of Western (typically male and Caucasian) technologists and scientists going through the frustrations and satisfactions of life in laboratories. However, such studies begged the question, where does this knowledge go, what does it do, and for whom? Later STS scholars often explored this question from the point of view of those in 'the margins' who are: peripheral to modern knowledge production (e.g. civil society organizations, laypersons); 'lacking' modern knowledge production (e.g. non-Western, indigenous); or excluded from modern knowledge production (e.g. female, minority, disabled).
This triple session will demonstrate how a theoretical focus on knowledge from the margins resists typical ways of conceptualizing producers, users and innovation, and radicalizes thinking about institutional change. Part I will topically focus on 'sciences from below' and how they question assumptions about the knowledge production process that are common to Western societies. Part II will demonstrate how perturbing the user/producer boundary resists typical ways of thinking about the design and consumption of information and communications technologies.  Part III will discuss how modern ideologies of technocracy and/or neoliberalism shape local knowledge and, conversely, allow for local knowledge to challenge expert regulation. STS and other scholars in women's studies,geography, political sociology of science, and sociology of technology will be interested in this session.