Jia Hui Lee

JAI HUI LEE, then a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was awarded funding in April 2017 to aid research on ‘Smelling Danger: Training Rats and Modeling Environments for Landmine Detection in Tanzania and Cambodia,’ supervised by Dr. Stefan Helmreich. The research is concerned with two questions: What social factors and historical events make Morogoro, Tanzania an important site for the production of scientific knowledge about rodents? Secondly, how do these factors and events set the stage for the emergence of rats as scientific objects? Bringing together the fields of history and anthropology of science and technology, this dissertation will document the various historical and social processes through which rodent science is produced by Tanzanian and European researchers and, later, applied as technology. The research examines two rodent schemes in Morogoro: one, a pest management research center based at the Sokoine Univeristy of Agriculture, and two, a Belgian social enterprise that trains giant pouched rats to detect landmines and tuberculosis. The dissertation is a ‘multispecies ethnography’ examining how human relationships with a maligned species such as rodents, along with their verminous histories, are reworked through sensing, trapping, and laboratory practices that form part of emergent scientific, transnational collaboration between the global North and South. The research traces the emergence of rodent science in Morogoro, Tanzania (1919-2019), from the British colonial period to present day post-independence Tanzania. Morogoro is today recognized as an international leader in pest management, rodent taxonomic research, and a site for the training of rats to detect landmines and tuberculosis.