Amit Prasad

Capitalizing Disease Biopolitics of Drug Trials in India

Recent success of Indian engineers, businessmen, as well as other technically qualified professionals has created an obsession with knowledge and creativity. Documents like India as a Knowledge Superpower have proliferated and we continually hear the mantra of investing in and harnessing of human capital. There are, however, several strands of human capital in India and not all of them harness knowledge and creativity. People on whom drugs are being tested represent one such human capital, which, even though it is being energetically mobilized to provide India with a strategic advantage in the world market, also highlights the contradictions within India’s shifting imaginary, economy and politics. Drug trials in India, in the context of neoliberal globalization, not only challenge and complicate, but also operate within a constellation of divisions — labor/capital, west/non-west, colonial/sovereign, national/global and so on. In this article I analyze how the people on whom drug testing is being done in India are being ‘harnessed’ as human capital, which leads to politicization of ‘bare life’ through ‘inclusive-exclusion’.

Ambivalent journeys of hope: Embryonic stem cell therapy in a clinic in India

Stem cell therapy in non-Western countries such as India has received a lot of attention. Apart from media reports, there are a number of social science analyses of stem cell policy, therapy, and research, their ethical implications, and impact of advertising on patients. Nevertheless, in the media reports as well as in academic studies, experiences of patients, who undertake overseas journeys for stem cell therapy, have largely been either ignored or presented reductively, often as a “false hope.” In this article, I analyze the experiences of patients and their “journeys of hope” to NuTech Mediworld, an embryonic stem cell therapy clinic in New Delhi, India. My analysis, which draws on my observations in the clinic and patients’ experiences, instead of seeking to adjudicate whether embryonic stem cell therapy in clinics such as NuTech is right or wrong, true or false, focuses on how patients navigate and contest these concerns. I utilize Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “concepts,” lines of flight and deterritorialization, to highlight how embryonic stem cell therapy’s “political economy of hope” embodies deterritorialization of several “regimes of truth” and how these deterritorializations impact patients’ experiences.

Imaginative geography, neoliberal globalization, and colonial distinctions: docile and dangerous bodies in medical transcription ‘outsourcing’

Information Technology (IT) ‘outsourcing,’ of which medical transcription in India is a part, has received relatively little attention from geographers. Most often, it has been bracketed more broadly within IT and its role in transforming transnational space-time configurations has been analyzed. IT outsourcing, more specifically, medical transcription outsourcing, which is the focus of this article, is not only marked by tensions, hierarchies, and ambivalences, it also reflects an emergent ‘imaginative geography’ of neoliberal globalization. This imaginative geography, as we argue in this article, is deceptively ambiguous because of its ambivalent articulation. Medical transcription outsourcing, for example, seems to operate on two contradictory registers, particularly in the United States and some European nations from where outsourcing to countries such as India is taking place. There is an acknowledgement and even celebration of the ‘flattening’ and inter-connectedness of different parts of the world, even while there is widespread criticism and fear of these transnational activities, as well as that of the non-western people engaged in them. The criticism and fear are often articulated in relation to instances of data theft. Nevertheless, a closer look shows that there is something more going on. We argue that such discursive constructions exemplify an imaginative geography that is rooted in an ambivalent desire for a reformed and recognizable ‘other’ who could be ‘best global citizens.’ This ambivalence undergirds a forked biopolitical strategy, which seeks to make the neoliberal worker docile and yet continually marks him/her as dangerous. We call this biopolitical strategy colonial governmentality to signify its forked operation as an art of government that seeks to define agenda/non-agenda (and not population or people), but continually draws upon colonial distinctions and practices.

Biopolitical Excess: Techno-Legal Assemblage of Stem Cell Research in India

Stem cell research on cardiac patients at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), which was disclosed through the media in 2005, created a storm. On the one hand, it was celebrated as a ‘global first in pioneering stem cell medicine’. On the other hand, not only the AIIMS study, but, more broadly, stem cell research and therapy in India was criticised for ‘tall claims [and] questionable ethics’. The responses of the policymakers and regulators in India were equally divergent. How are we to understand the contingency and unpredictability of the regulatory regime in India? The answers to this and other related questions are often presented through a regulatory fix—countries such as India need to tighten their regulatory regime. The need for a legally binding regulatory regime is undeniable; nevertheless, a narrow focus on a regulatory fix fails to explain several issues. In this article, I analyse the stem cell research on cardiac patients at AIIMS. Through a focus on epistemic, ethical and juridical assemblage of stem cell research, I highlight the inescapable contingency in the translation between ‘governmental rationality’ and ‘the practice of government’ and show how this reflects biopolitical excess.

Entangled Histories and Imaginative Geographies of Technoscientific Innovations

The issues that Vilnius Declaration raises and Ulrike Felt’s engagement with them have profound implications within as well as beyond Europe. The role of social sciences and humanities (SSH) in innovation is in the spotlight in many nations. It is being debated even at the level of particular institutions such as my own university. In the USA the House of Representatives Bill HR 4186, which is aimed at enhancing ‘investment in innovation through scientific research and development’, controversially seeks to cut the National Science Foundation’s funding for social and behavioral sciences. In this article, I briefly draw upon my research to extend the debate on the relationship between SSH and sciences and engineering. Through a dialogic Science as Culture, 2014 Vol. 23, No. 3, 432–439, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2014.927629

Taj Mahal, circulations of science, and (post) colonial present

ABSTRACT This article makes a case for post-structuralist intervention in history of science and technology. The issue for me is not simply historical/archival elisions and distortions. Rather, following Derrida, I would like to highlight that the presences and absences (i.e. what is seen/shown and what is erased) are systematically related, and a deconstruction of their interplay is necessary to unravel the cultural (un)conscious that often undergirds any historical discourse. Specifically, I explore two (post) colonial implications of Eurocentric historicism that undergird diffusion theories and continue to impact history and sociology of science and technology. First, I investigate how the West not only becomes the center of calculation but also an object of calculation for local hegemony and dominance. Second, through a deconstructive reading of Meera Nanda’s critique of Hindu science, I suggest that both Hindu science and its critique are exemplifications of a (post) colonial present.

Introduction: Global Assemblages of Technoscience

Technoscience, although largely a term of art that science and technology scholars use to signify the role of heterogeneous actors in the co-construction of science, technology and society, has slowly but steadily been permeating the colloquial vocabulary.1 The term was introduced by Bruno Latour to present a broader concern within science and technology studies: ‘Instead of black boxing the technical aspects of science and then looking for social influences...be there before the box closes and becomes black’ (Latour, 1987, p. 21). Latour’s intervention was not simply epistemological/methodological. It blurred the boundaries between epistemological and ontological, natural and social and humans and non-humans. Opening the black box of science and technology, according to Latour and other actor–network theorists, brought to the fore ‘the heterogeneous elements that make up technoscience, including the social ones’ (Latour, 1987, p. 62). Technoscience, to draw on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s terminology, represents an ‘order-word’—an enunciation that ‘in itself implies collective assemblages’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 82). The term technoscience, thus, ‘can be evaluated...as a function of its pragmatic implications, in other words, in relation to implicit presuppositions, immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations it expresses and which introduce new configurations of bodies’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 83). The issue then is not only whether ‘it is less epistemologically, politically, and emotionally powerful to see startling hybrids [of technoscience]...than to ask for whom and how these hybrids work’ (Haraway, 1997, p. 280; Star, 1991), but also whether the assemblages and the field that are implied in the Latourian enunciation of the term technoscience are exclusionary. We need to, as Deleuze and

‘Things Do Look Different from Here, on the Borderlands’: An Interview with Warwick Anderson

Amit PrAsAd (AP): Thank you Warwick for the interview. It is indeed a pleasure and honour to have this opportunity to further engage with your vast intellectual contribution. I am hoping to use this occasion to further explore some of your analytical and methodological interventions. Let me start by taking you back nearly one and a half decades. In the special issue that you co-edited in 2002 you deployed the phrase ‘postcolonial technoscience’, which acquired a trajectory of its own and has been commonly used in various articles and books thereafter. Obviously, you were juxtaposing postcolonial analytics and sensibility and the Latourian concept of technoscience. In fact, you candidly asserted in your introduction to the special issue: ‘A postcolonial study of science and technology might offer new, and more richly textured, answers to many of the questions posed in actor-network-theory’ [ANT] (2002, p. 649). Thereafter, in another article, you wrote: ‘While they [actor-network-theorists] shy from any direct engagement with postcolonial studies, they seem to have picked up and amplified the vibe’ (2009, p. 392). More recently, you have celebrated Wen-yuan Lin and John Law’s call for ‘balance of betrayal’ in STS (Lin & Law, 2014), calling their contribution ‘an enticing prospect’ that opens new possibilities for postcolonial investigations. Can you elaborate your intellectual affinity and connections with ANT? And do you think with Lin and Law’s intervention ANT has not only embraced postcolonial concerns, but is also charting new trajectories in that regard?

Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), after some initial skepticism in the 1970s and the early 1980s, quickly transitioned into, as Kelly Joyce forcefully argues in her book, Magnetic Appeal, a ‘cultural icon’. Its iconic status could be discerned not only from its superfast proliferation in clinics all over the US (e.g. in the mid-1980s Los Angeles had more MRI machines than the whole of Canada), but also in its cultural framing in the media. A reporter for the Saturday Evening News described MRI in the following way in 1987:

Book Reviews : VINEETA HOON, Living on the Move: Bhotiyas of the Kumaon Himalaya. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996, 256 pp. Rs 345

as marginal, indigenous, tribals with the express purpose of bringing them into the mainstream. This involves active intervention of the government and other allied agencies involved in policy matters concerning the development of the area. Development in this context somehow always denotes better use of technology. What has to be kept in mind is that better technology means that which has power to provide better utility which in turn is defined in terms of consumption levels. The fact that all this has led to a deterioration of the environment, depletion of natural resources and even degradation of social values has never made us question our development strategy. But, what is more disturbing is the belligerence with which this strategy is thrust on the so-called marginals without making any effort to understand their needs and their