Locating South Asia in Social Studies of Science and Technology

Abstract

While researchers engaging with South Asia, often as a research site, advance various STS commitments, concerns, and its conceptual vocabulary, the empirical richness of the region and the unique community of South Asian researchers remain scattered, underarticulated, and invisible. This session seeks to highlight and investigate what makes South Asia a unique site to research emergent forms and consequences of technoscientific developments collating the sustained critiques of scientific knowledge and technoscientific state-building from the region. Simultaneously, it is also an effort to carve a space in 4S for a community of South Asian STS researchers to discuss how their personal commitments, concerns, and experiences in South Asia co-constitute their engagement with STS. The session asks how STS informs South Asian studies when technoscientific developments become primary subjects and objects of research. How do South Asian studies inform STS on questions of epistemological pluralism, technoscientific practices, intersectionality, scientific hegemony, and democracy? It is a call to (re)engage the pasts of South Asian STS scholarship to critically intervene in its presents and reinvent its possible futures.

Chair

• Misria Shaik Ali, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Discussant

• annapurna mamidipudi, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Individual Presentations

• Decoloniality and social justice as motives for STS in the Global South: reflections from an ethnography of research on human difference in India - Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Universität Bayreuth

• An ‘Elephant’s Gestation’: Rebuilding Madras City’s Water Infrastructure 1904-1919 - Viswanathan Venkataraman, King's College London

• Locating Delhi's air - Prerna Srigyan, University of California - Irvine

• Photovoltaics, Pasture, And Puffed Rice: The Production Of Low-Carbon Infrastructure In India’s Smart Cities - Ankit Bhardwaj, New York University

• An Ethnography of Edison, New Jersey: Tech Expansion in an International State - Kinjal Dave, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizer

• Ranjit Pal Singh, Data & Society Research Institute