“City Inside the Oven”: Mediated Technoscience Publics of Mobile (Tower) Antenna Radiation Controversy

• In Event: New Global Mediated of Publics, Citizenship(s), and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Since 2010, Indian news media have been reporting on cases of cancer among urban residents living close to mobile towers. As uncertainty looms about their detrimental health effects, mobile tower antennas have become an unstable technology, with adversely affected stakeholders—scientists, cellular operators, oncologists, cancer patients, and journalists—coming together to form a technoscience public. These stakeholders use media to influence public opinion and I introduce the concept of mediated technoscience publics to conceptualize media’s constitutive role in creation, expansion, and contraction of technoscience publics. Drawing on site visits and interviews, I track reconfigurations of mediated technoscience publics across scientific representations, vernacular newspapers and lifestyle shows as the controversy unfolds. My approach borrows from media anthropology, political theory, and science studies and closely examines media practices (Rao 2010) and materiality of publics (Bennett 2010) in order to theorize performative mediations of socio-technical knowledge production (Barad 2007; Kember and Zylinska 2012).

Author

• Rahul Mukherjee, University of Pennsylvania