Speaker: Amit Prasad, Georgia Institute of Technology
Chair: Naveen Thayyil, Department of HUSS, IIT Delhi
Title: J P S Uberoi, Science, Swaraj, and a Postcolonial Agenda
Abstract:
In 1968, more than half a century ago, Uberoi had succinctly characterized the “matrix of science and swaraj in today’s world: Rich: Poor :: International: National :: White: Black.” For Uberoi science, like any other knowledge, was intimately tied to the political and it was imperative for independent India to challenge “the ruling scientific theories of nature” because they were undergirded by vivisection and violence and replicated colonial hegemony. He thus traced an alternative genealogy of modern science and proposed an alternative science that relied on a non-dualist semiological method. Unlike many other sociologists of science of his time (and at present as well) the alternative science he presented was not bounded within the non-West or the West. Instead, he sought to transgress the dualist boundaries between the West and the non-West (as well as several others such as those between science/truth and value), while emphasizing the discursive power of such a divide. In this presentation I critically engage with Uberoi’s writings on science to highlight their continued relevance for an equitable and non-violent postcolonial agenda.
Speaker Bio:
Amit Prasad is a Professor at the School of History and Sociology in Georgia Institute of Technology. He specializes in global, transnational, and postcolonial sociology and history of science, technology, and medicine. His research focuses on the history of the present – in particular, how history of colonialism continues to impact present day norms, values, and practices. His goal has been to excavate the complex and often contradictory entanglements of colonial tropes, ideologies, etc. with emergent knowledges and practices of science, technology, and medicine. His publications include Imperial Technoscience: Entangled Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), and Science Studies Meets Colonialism (Polity, 2022). Drawing on an ethnographic study of a stem cell clinic, he is writing his third book that is tentatively titled Miracle or Science: Scientific Uncertainty, Contested Ethics, and Global Melange in a Stem Cell Laboratory. He is currently the editor of the journal Science, Technology and Society (Sage).
