Decolonizing Science: Episode 5
Episode 5 of the ‘Decolonizing Science’ series discusses STS - or the field of Science, Technology and Society - and its changing landscape around the globe. Panelists in the conversation include Ashawari Chaudhuri, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Fa-Ti Fan, and Kim Fortun. The session was convened by Ashawari Chaudhuri and MIT PhD researcher Priyanka deSouza, with additional hosting by Emmett McKinney and support from Allison Lee.
The session was recorded on October 09, 2020, and lightly edited for clarity. Both the video and the audio podcast are included, with key insights summarized below.
Cover Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash
Quick Video Reference: Questions
00:05:38 Could you please provide us with a brief overview of your work?
00:13:20 In your research fields and locales, how to colonial legacies and STS from Euro-America shape knowledge formation?
00:22:05 Is there a distinctive field of STS or History of Science in the countries and contexts that you study?
00:33:38 What are some of the analytic tools that have emerged from your work that challenge, reshape, or provincialize some of the existing STS categories emerging from the Euro-American context?
00:49:16 All of your work is at the intersection of the environment, health, and medicine. What are some of the insights and analyses from your field that you feel are particularly relevant in the present moment?
01:01:26 One of the aims of this podcast has been to bring together people who are thinking about STS, but are approaching it from different kinds of engagements - activism, academic, policy-making, and the like. Are there was in which your work forges interdisciplinary engagements and brings STS from the classroom to the field?
Key Takeaways
1. Decolonizing sts involves actively investigating sources and structures of knowledge.
“It’s also about our need to question the usefulness of Euro-American categories in spaces, in which histories have not followed a linear understanding of time, or that don’t profit from a colonial frame.” - Gabriela Soto Laveaga
“It’s also because STS methodologies developed in the Euro-American context or academia often have very different assumptions, and the socio-political context and their concerns are often very different from when we study different areas.” - Fa-Ti Fan
“I’ve realized how much STS analysis is, at the end of the day, quite functionalist. It’s about how things come together and stabilize, whether it’s a knowledge formation, or a vaccine, or a laboratory. And so the edges, the dynamics that unsettle and undermine, really are under-observed, under-articulated.” - Kim Fortun
“…it is helpful to try to develop what we call “middle range theory.” Middle range theory is more historical in this society - a conditioned or sensitive theory more suitable to particular locales or areas or historical spaces you study.” - Fa-Ti Fan
2. We need to move away from singularity, and towards plurality of knowledge, of sources, and of experiences.
“I think that one reason STS in India isn’t as institutionally visible is because of these monolithic origin stories, but also the assumption that universities are the origins of fields of thought.” - Kim Fortun
“If you can have multiple stories, and approach the same concept through different lenses, I think that’s the least one can do to not have one story dominate in any context.” - Ashawari Chaudhuri
“…it is no longer sufficient to simply speak about de-centering histories. That we need to switch the analysis to yet a new place. But if we maintain the same analytic frame, we rely on the same categories, the same terms, a very similar picture emerges.” - Gabriela Soto Laveaga
“If you take hermeneutics seriously, it really goes against the grain of many of the tools that have been developed for collaborative analysis, which assumes a very early agreement on what the analytic mode is… there’s a consensual origin to it. …It’s a method problem, but rooted in really, really deep historical and social formations.” - Kim Fortun
3. Methodologically, we cannot assume similar procedures or results in different contexts.
“And so the notion of the quotidian anthropocene is, what does the anthropocene look like, and how is it articulated where it hits the ground in different places?” - Kim Fortun
“…when I look at China during the Cultural Revolution and what is going on today, that there were very disconcerting similarities and parallels that you think would be in such different historical, different time, space, society and the polity - how could there be such parallels?” - Fa-Ti Fan
“…when you are writing or thinking about agriculture by technology, time is not something, or experiences around time is not something, that one talks about.” - Ashawari Chaudhuri
“And also we have to understand such concepts of citizen science and civic tech. …These are based on the model of a participatory liberal democracy, but on the other hand though, it’s questionable if it’s actually applicable in every context of what we think of citizen’s science because ultimately it’s still a concept where citizens are shifting it.” - Fa-Ti Fan
“Another important concept that I think of, is what I think of as “discursive risks and gaps”. And a discursive risk is when you put an analytic frame on a phenomena that delimits how you can see it, and often has dramatic operational effects.” - Kim Fortun
“…farmers and their different experiences of time, of the way you cultivate BT cotton, the GM seed, is very different from the earlier hybrids. The relations of the environment became very important for the farmers in considering BT cotton as a good alternative or not.” - Ashawari Chaudhuri
4. Storytelling, narratives, and modes of communications matter.
“Remapping, even mentally, is an amazing analytic tool because it invites one to think about new actors, new connections, new tensions.” - Gabriela Soto Laveaga
“If we’re speaking about a former colonized area of the world, and we examine the space solely with maps - the visual representation of space of the colonizers - we miss a lot of details.” - Gabriela Soto Laveaga
“So I have also experimented with what we might call “Asia’s method” so that is, in part is, to experiment with different subject positions and the epistemologies, and also take into account the longer historical trajectory. …So by putting a longer historical trajectory, you might see this is only part of a larger picture.” - Fa-Ti Fan
“But you need to give them this narrative and to say, “No one can define you, and let me show you how we think of this particular story. Let me recreate how we can tell it differently.” - Gabriela Soto Laveaga
“Methods were seen as formulaic, like if you taught methods it meant that you were going to get this reproductive view of the world. But I’ve come to understand is, if we don’t teach methods, we’re also going to reproduce the world as we know it, because it is so deeply in our muscle memory. And so experimental methods as a way to dislodge hegemony in our own institutions and practice.” - Kim Fortun
“…the ability to speak, to engage with other languages - that is an extraordinary analytic tool as well.” - Gabriela Soto Laveaga
5. Modernity offers a distinct frame for social and political crises
“That ultimately, there’s something about the modern state and society on a much broader scale than we had envisioned, but now maybe modernity is actually somewhat more complex than what now we think.” - Fa-Ti Fan
“It was really after Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 in the U.S. that disaster became a kind of community. And I think it’s become a really important community in STS, because it really draws out what I think of as the underbelly of modernity.” - Kim Fortun
About the Speakers
Ashawari Chaudhuri is a post-doctoral fellow in the Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (NUS). In 2019, she completed her PhD in Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society (STS) from MIT, where she researched agricultural biotechnology in India, and studied how communities that are on opposite ends of the agrarian political economy understand and work with genetically modified seeds. She is interested in temporalities or experiences of time, the notion of seeds as commodities, and bridging agriculture and environment in South Asia.
Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of the History of Science & Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University. Her first book, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects and the Making of the Pill, won the Robert K. Merton Best Book prize in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies from the American Sociological Association. Her second monograph, Sanitizing Rebellion: Physician Strikes, Public Health and Repression in Twentieth Century Mexico, examines the role of healthcare providers as both critical actors in the formation of modern states and as social agitators. Her latest book project seeks to re-narrate histories of twentieth century agriculture development aid from the point of view of India and Mexico. Her co-edited forum (with Warwick Anderson) on “Decolonizing Histories in Theory and Practice” is in History and Theory's latest issue.
Fa-ti Fan’s research centers on the history of science, modern East Asia, nationalism, and imperialism. He is particularly interested in the issues of cultural encounter, knowledge translation, representations of nature, and inter/transnational cultural relations. He has published a book on British scientific encounters in Qing dynasty China and is currently working on two projects: one on the intersections of nature, nation, and international politics in Republican China and the other on science and mass politics in Communist China.
Kim Fortun is Professor in the University of California Irvine’s Department of Anthropology. Her research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, and on experimental ethnographic methods and research design. Fortun’s book Advocacy After Bhopal Environmentalism, Disaster, New World Orders was awarded the 2003 Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society. Currently, Fortun is working on a book titled Late Industrialism: Making Environmental Sense, on The Asthma Files, and on the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE). Fortun also runs the EcoEd Research Group, which develops curriculums for young students (Kindergarten - Grade 12) focused on environmental issues. She helps organize both the Disaster-STS Research Network and the Research Data Alliance’s Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group, as well as co-edits a book series for University of Pennsylvania Press titled Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster.
About the Hosts / Organizers
Priyanka deSouza is a PhD researcher at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning in the Senseable City Lab. Priyanka studies air pollution from both a scientific and urban planning perspective, with a focus on East Africa.
Emmett McKinney is a Producer for CoLab Radio, where he works to amplify community narratives. Emmett holds a master in city planning degree from MIT (2020). His area of focus includes transportation and water infrastructure, and specifically how equity and justice are integrated into data-driven planning. Outside of CoLab, Emmett can be found running, drinking coffee, and dancing to reggaeton.
Allison Lee is a producer of CoLab Radio and a masters student in the MIT Dept of Urban Studies and Planning. She is interested in balancing conservation and development, and places community and culture at the heart of her work.
About the Series
The ‘Decolonizing Science’ podcast series was initiated in Fall 2019 by two passionate researchers Priyanka deSouza and Jia-Hui Lee who reached out to CoLab Radio about bringing this conversation to the forefront. Previous episodes include:
Episode 1: A discussion between Priyanka and Jia-Hui on the concept and movement of “decolonizing science”.
Episode 2: An interview with Dr. Pallavi Pant, air quality scientist and founder of the web platform ‘India Air Quality Hub’.
Episode 3: A roundtable of interdisciplinary panelists focused on air pollution in an Indian context.
Episode 4: A roundtable on air pollution challenges and international collaborations in African cities.
There is more to come so stay tuned! If this topic strikes a chord with your work or interests, please reach out to us at colabcom@mit.edu.