Workshop Proceedings

Please find below the list of workshop proceedings. The materials are strictly for learning/instructional purpose. You may take consent from the resource persons before citing the materials. If you face difficulty accessing the materials, please write to <interdisciplinarity.nits@gmail.com>.

 

• Lectures by Esha Shah

1. The ‘object’ in Science & Technology: To listen, click here
2. The ‘subject’ in Science & Technology: To listen, click here
3. History of the Gene: Models & Reductionism: To listen, click here

 

• Lectures by Sasheej Hegde

1. Bridging Models of Inquiry I: To listen, click here
2. Bridging Models of Inquiry II: To listen, click here

 

• Articles by Sasheej Hegde

1. Responding to the Life Sciences: Genome Research and Beyond: Link here
2. Bridging Models of Inquiry: The Scholastic and the Reflexive: Link here
3. Bridging Divides? Sounding a Limit: Link here

 

Workshop Schedule

Venue: Research Promotion Cell (RPC),  across the NITS cafe.

§ §  In order to reduce carbon footprint, there won’t be print-outs of the schedule at the venue. We’ll not supply bottled water either. We’ll have water though and appreciate if you carry your recyclable/reusable water bottle.

DAY 1: 18 May

10:20-10:30: Registration

10:30-10:50: Inaugural Session

11:00-12:30: The ‘Object’ in Science & Technology / Esha Shah
14:30-16:00: Challenge of the Life Sciences: Genome Research / Sasheej Hegde
16:15-17:30: History of the Gene: Models & Reductionism / Esha Shah

DAY 2: 19 May

10:00-11:15: The ‘Subject’ in Science & Technology / Esha Shah
11:30-12:30: Bridging Models of Inquiry I / Sasheej Hegde
14:15-15:45: Participant Speakers:
Priyanka Dass Saharia | Is Hiroshima only a Technical Answer to a technical Question?
T. A. Subramanya P. | Scientia not Consilience: Disciplines as Wittgenstein’s Games
Anshul Bajpai | Importance fo Interdisciplinary Study in Modern Educational System
16:00-17:30: Bridging Models of Inquiry II/ Sasheej Hegde

17:30 onwards: High Tea

Dr. Shah Will Speak On…

“Object” and “Subject” in STS: How and Why do we know What we know?

Having been trained as an engineer, I had to unlearn a lot when twenty years ago I first started engaging with social sciences and humanities. In these two decades I have struggled to learn the art of reflextion, to acquire the spirit of what Paul Ricoeur calls “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Applying this suspicion, further in Ricoeur’s words, “telling the story” of science and technology “otherwise”, has taken me to anthropology and history, to debates on globalisation, modernity and development and recently to philosophy.

In my first session on 18^th May on “objects” I will look at the debates in STS (Science & Technology Studies) on the making of objects – facts and artefacts (technology included). “What there is” and “the study of what there is”, or in other words, what is the object of the study and how it reflects the object in itself. To situate the debates in the history of ideas, I will only briefly begin with the age-old question asked in philosophy: do our knowledge of the object corresponds the object in itself, focusing more emphatically on why is that we need to even ask this question. Getting past this question, in the main part of the session I will look at the debates in STS on the way objects (facts and artefacts) are created, constructed, performed, and enacted in our social, political and cultural world and how they are studied within disciplinary boundaries. In the last part of the session I will engage with the most recent debates in STS on what is called empirical ontology or “turn to ontology” that is allegedly centred on the question: how objects are enacted in practices and how they are invested with political rationality and normativity? In my second session on the 18^th May I will discuss the way the reductionist concept of the particulate gene emerged and undergone transformation over the twentieth century. The question that I ask is: what do we know of the ontology of the gene and what are the political implications of what we know?

In the last three years, responding to my own inability to fathom the deeply troubling questions in my own personal life, my research focus has shifted from understanding and explaining the objects to making sense of the subjects: who is the scientist-subject who desires to know? Towards the end of his life, Freud was also asking similar questions in his last work on Moses and Monotheism (1939): What are the psychic pre-requisites for the advancement of knowledge? How the analysis of the soul is structured vis-a-vis the analysis of science? The same question is asked differently in recent times. “Is Science emotional?” asks science historian Paul White. Such a question about science might even mean a heresy. The view that science, supposed to be objective, depends in essential ways upon highly specific constellations of emotional and existential – subjective – experiences is fundamentally paradoxical. In fact, in history of science, subjectivity and objectivity are commonly arrayed in opposition. Not only that subjectivity disrupts objectivity, but the role of individual scientist’s subjectivity in the making of science is often obliterated, treated as merely incidental, designated as mind reading, or relegated to biographies. Even when subjectivity is accounted as co-implicated with objectivity, it is treated only as mental states of the collectives. And when the scientist’s subjectivity is indeed treated in individual capacity, it is predominantly constructed as the neo-Kantian ideal – a unified and wilful, self-determined, self-regulated, active and autonomous, rational subject wilfully driven by social and scientific ethos. Another approach popular among historians is to portray the scientist-subject as a Foucaultian construct, whose subjectivity is often entirely reduced to nothing but merely the effects of power. I will introduce some of the key texts in history of science that foreground the question of subjectivity, will also briefly introduce feminists epistemologies in which the idea of what can be counted as objective science and who is the knowing subject have been revised from their positivist and foundationalist predecessors.

Lastly, I will end the session briefly discussing my own position that I have elaborated in the recently completed manuscript on Affective History of Genetic Science in which discussing life histories of six scientists who had pioneering influence on the making of genetic science over the twentieth century, I have posited that scientists’ particular ways of being and belonging pioneer the structures of rational and cognitive thought, here I have claimed that intellectual paradigms are affect worlds, in other words, the conceptual theories are isomorphic with the world emotionally and existentially desired, or in the words of Michael Polanyi (following Sartre) I have shown how existence precedes essence. Unfortunately there will not be sufficient time to discuss one of the chapters of the book, hopefully that will happen sometime in the future.

– Esha Shah

 

Prof. Hegde Will Speak On…

Bridging Models of Inquiry

 

Asked to speak about my ‘work’, I have often ventured to submit that it concerns a subject area intermediate between ‘philosophy’, social and political theory and culture critique: the question, specifically, of the enabling histories with which one works.  This may be construed as a vague and inconclusive admission, although if one were to get its measure through my specific contributions – whether it be the logic of disciplines and the limits of a sociology of knowledge or the interpretation of modernity or even the appraisal of normative languages like multiculturalism, secularism, human rights, constitutionalism, justice and affirmative action – then perhaps the picture may not seem so indeterminate.

Be that as it may, I must submit that my disciplinary affiliation has been – and remains – sociology, albeit rendered along the terms identified by the historian and  philosopher of science Ian Hacking as that of ‘the complacent disciplinarian’.  Insistently, in recent times, I have found myself returning to the question of ‘inquiry’, indeed of the place of theory and method in the design of inquiries (humanistic or otherwise).  I am particularly concerned to explore two dispositions internal to disciplines – what I term, broadly, the ‘scholastic’ and the ‘reflexive’ – even as one strives to get a measure of their intertwining across spaces of inquiry.  In a recent recounting of the spaces of disciplinarity and post-disciplinarity (Recontextualizing Disciplines: Three Lectures on Method, 2014), I have ventured among other things to formulate the point whether a purely disciplinary capacity (that is to say, a grounding in one’s own discipline) could envisage alternative perspectives which by definition a disciplinary capacity cannot occupy.  We must confront the inner coherence (or otherwise) of this possibility; examine more intently what this would yield about both the genealogy of disciplines and their epistemology, and, not the least, the question of the contextualization that could be productive of inquiry.

Secondly: the philosopher Wittgenstein has shrewdly remarked, somewhere in his notebooks, the following: not empiricism, and yet realism in reflection, that is the hardest thing.  We must ask what this could yield to the design of inquiries, especially those conceived in cross-disciplinary terms and which anticipate the problematic status of their ‘objects’ (I am here thinking particularly of the opening up of the world of the life sciences and the challenges that this poses for renewed social science reflection).  Must this not entail a disruption of the consensus that social scientific work (or even work across disciplines) should limit itself to the specification of the ‘conditions of existence’ of objects?  And yet, once this consensus is fragmented, the consequences could be startling for all inquiries (humanistic or otherwise), which provokes a further thought about the status of the ‘objects’ of one’s research and about theoretical postulation more generally.

Hopefully our blog will unravel, and come to inhabit more intensely the space of these (and such other) questions.  I see myself as a participant in this exploration.

– Sasheej Hegde

 

 

 

Meet the Resource Persons…

Esha Shah is an engineer by training and anthropologist and historian by choice and self-learning. Since her doctorate from the Wageningen University in the Netherlands, she has been working on science and technology-led development in India on the interface of modernity and democracy. Since then, she has held research and teaching positions at the ISEC in Bangalore, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at University of Sussex, UK, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in Maastricht University, the Netherlands. At the IDS and at the Maastricht University she has taught MA courses on STS (science and technology studies) and globalization and development. Currently, she is developing research interests on the way in which subjectivity (including emotions and affects) shape rationality and normativity, including the objectivity in scientific knowledge. She has recently completed a two years book-writing fellowship (2013 and 2015) with the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla where she worked on a monograph that re-interprets the history of reductionism in genetic science over the twentieth-century as an affective/emotive history.

She can be contacted at <esha.shah[at]live.com>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sasheej Hegde teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad.  His research and teaching has concerned a subject area intermediate between ‘philosophy’, social and political theory, and culture critique: the question, specifically, of the enabling histories with which one works and the conceptual basis of human inquiry and socio-political activism. More directly, his work has implicated three domains of inquiry: the Structure and Dynamics of Disciplines; the Interpretation of Modernity; and Research on Normative Political Languages.  He has published fairly extensively in each of these spheres, while invariably retaining a reflective focus and incorporating many epistemological questions and socio-historical settings.  His current work actively negotiates the design of inquiry across disciplinary domains, while also opening up to new questions of law/ethics and constitutional jurisprudence.  He remains as passionate as ever about anagrammatic writing.

He can be contacted at <sasheej[at]gmail.com>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rethinking Interdisciplinarity: Bridging the Rift

Workshop on the Interface of the Sciences & the Humanities

When | 18-19 May 2016

Where | National Institute of Technology, Silchar

With the increasing formalization of knowledge, higher education and pedagogy have inherited a separation between the study of the ‘natural worlds’ (Naturwissenchaften), which is material/biotic, and that of the ‘world of humans’ (Sozial/Geistes-wissenchaften). As a result, these two domains have developed as two insulated and divorced bodies of knowledge systems. Again, the ‘natural world’ is further separated into natural sciences and technology, while the ‘world of humans’ diverge into humanities and the social sciences. However, this natural/human science binary, and more generally speaking, the dyadic logic in the taxonomy of knowledge system are typical products of post-Enlightenment/ Rationalist Western modernity (cf. Descartes, Kant) and have no resonance whatsoever in the context of the ‘pre-modern’ non-West (say, for example, Greece, Persia, Arab, India). How we study our world is often grounded in systems of values and beliefs emergent from our dispositions. Family structure, religion, state politics, economics, social class etc. among other things shape these systems of value, the very ‘paradigms’ upon which choose our objects and frame our methods of inquiries. The point, therefore, is to re-visit and understand these separations, rather the premise upon which these separations are valued, and situate them in history and context, and in so doing, rethink how this new (interdisciplinary) understanding may contribute towards transforming how we perceive the world, not as a fractured entity but as an organic whole.

 

Invoking ‘modern’ Science’s reliance on non-empirical/’fictional’ stuff – think of, say, the String Theory among others – the workshop questions the fundamental value system that renders possible the divorce between the Sciences & the Humanities based on dyadic values. The fact/value, analytical/perceptive, objective/subjective, nature/culture binaries retain the disciplinary separation, although these obscure a holistic vision toward an(y) ‘object of study’. The workshop intends to probe into issues of subjectivity and social constructivism in the Sciences (cf. Poincare), and reflects on the plausibility of a genuinely integrationist model instead that reconciles Humanities & the Natural Sciences

The following pointers, which are by no means exhaustive, will give an overview of the trajectory of the workshop.

• Scientific Fiction & Literary Reality (cf. Sundar Sarukkai)
• Alternative Sciences (cf. Ashis Nandy)
• Science, Technology & Augmented Reality
• Historicism in Science & Techno-determinism
• Science as Narrative
• Science, State & Ideology
• Mathematicization of Science/Technology
• Models and Reductionism
• Science/Technology & the Anthropocene

Prof. Sasheej Hegde, University of Hyderabad and Dr. Esha Shah, ex-faculty Maastricht University, Netherlands have generously agreed to serve as resource persons for the workshop.

Please register your interest by filling out the registration form before 8 May 2016. There is no registration fees for attending the workshop. We have limited seats to be allotted on first-register basis. The Participation certificates will be issued to all participants. The institute will not be able to offer accommodation or travel support to the participants. However, accommodation, if available, can be reserved for participants on payment basis.

Reaching NIT Silchar: NIT, Silchar, located on the Silchar-Hailakandi road, just 8 kms off the Silchar town. To reach NIT, Silchar campus, one has to first reach Silchar which has direct flight connections with Kolkata, Guwahati and Imphal; and direct train connections with Kolkata and Delhi via Guwahati. By road, Silchar is well connected with nearly all major cities in the North-east.

Contact: interdisciplinarity.nits@gmail.com

For registration, click here.