Yogita Suresh
The image features a scientist holder the Covid-19 Vaccine beside an AI robot
Image Credits: WikiCommons
This article is part of a special series titled “Productive Disruptions.” The series features contributions from Graduate Students and Early Career Researchers in Science and Technology Studies (STS), who reflect on how they enter and engage with the field through theory, methodology, and ethnographic practice while being “formally” enrolled in or affiliated with other disciplines such as Sociology, International Relations, and more. Serving as an introduction to the upcoming roundtable “Productive Disruptions,” this series leads into the session scheduled for 16 December 2025 at the STS-IN Conference, hosted at O.P. Jindal University, Delhi NCR.
At the core of STS is the exploration of the set of relationships and co-constitution of science and technology with the “social.” Working in the field of STS, I found that the set of relationships changes when one moves from the realm of science to the realm of technology, particularly in higher education settings. They form distinctive networks of social organisations that construct ideal subjects of practice. STS scholars (Latour 1987; Haraway 1985) have argued that this distinction is often blurred and difficult to navigate, and therefore propose the term “technoscience” because “scientific practice and technical practice are so intermingled that one can speak only of technoscience” (Latour 1987, 142). Of course, S&T overlap in several contexts and become elusive to separate. Still, as philosophers have argued for centuries, differences emerge in the orientations of science versus those of technology.
I don’t intend to provide a definitional difference or even analyse the basic component of “what” constitutes science versus technology, but rather, I am interested in exploring this distinction through the subject, namely, the scientist or the engineer, and how they are constituted differently by constructions of ideal types in the imagination of academic institutions. I provide this brief problematic as an encounter in my field visits as a prelude to the roundtable on entering STS as graduate students, where I hope to further unpack this discussion. In 2022, I spent one year conducting an ethnography of a premier technical institute in India (one of the Indian Institutes (s) of Technology), trying to understand the lifeworlds of B.Tech (Bachelor of Technology) students, while simultaneously also studying institutional archives and administrative conditions to understand how they construct the “ideal” student of technology. I also had the opportunity to do the same at a premier science institute in Bangalore, but for a much shorter period (3 months). In both cases, I found that institutions, through their infrastructure and pedagogy, enforce a re-fashioning of the individual to act desirably in the pursuit of science or technology. This short article will discuss how Indian technical and scientific institutions cultivate distinct yet overlapping ideal subjects, reflecting different moral and epistemic imaginaries.
Who is the ideal Engineering Subject?
While rummaging through course outlines and institutional material of IIT X as part of my fieldwork, I found this list in a lecture titled ‘Professional Ethics and Social Responsibility’ in the course ‘Engineering Ethics.’ Students of technology were encouraged to reorient themselves along these lines to constitute themselves as “ethical” engineers:
- “Setting priorities in life
- Peer Pressure
- Importance of being optimistic
- Self-discipline
- Self-enhancement/improvement strategies
- Over-exploitation of natural resources
- Being judgmental
- Caste system in India
- Overuse of mobile in daily life
- Time management.”
It was interesting to observe the pedagogical transformation from Engineering Ethics to the ethical engineer. These 10 points are valuable in discussing how the entrepreneurial self of the engineer is constructed in the narrative of the institution. The IITs not only train students in engineering knowledge, but also prepare them for the neoliberal market. At once, they create both the engineer and the employee. One way to think about this is that technical institutes are engaged in a specific type of “making” that differs from others. Heidegger’s argument (1954) on the essence of technology becomes appropriate here. He argues that the “essence” of technology often lies outside of the realm of the technical entirely. Some of these points stick out like a sore thumb, like ‘Caste system’ and ‘overuse of mobile in daily life’, and seem completely divorced from engineering and technology. However, they indicate a particular social organisation in the technical institute that influences their roles as engineers, making them as much a part of engineering training as Mathematics and Physics.
In my field notes, what becomes strikingly important are concepts of “time management,” “merit”, and “self-discipline” in becoming the ideal student. They signify the ideal engineering subject, who is extremely hard working, displays resilience, who has their priorities set and showcases an excellent standard of merit (often indicative of class and caste privileges). Engineering education, therefore, attempts to construct the entrepreneurial subject (Foucault 1991, Brockling 2016), that is self-reliant, innovative, competitive and profitable.
Lastly, the distinctive characteristic that I found to be relevant is the potential of the engineering/technologist to “make” or alter matter to the extent that it can cause changes in material life. This entails discourses of problem-solving and “merit” in the practice of techne – the capacity to make things along rational principle (Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, VI.4, 1140a1 23).
Thus, the ideal engineering subject seems to emerge not merely as an expert of technical knowledge but as a disciplined, self-regulating individual moulded to fit market expectations and institutional demands. In producing this subject, engineering education blurs the line between moral formation and technical training, revealing how neoliberal ethics becomes a technology of the self.
Science, Morality and the Subject
I use three excerpts from interviews that I conducted with professors/students of science from a premier science institute in India, to think through what might constitute the ideal “scientific” subject.
Prof. J (Department of Physics)
I spoke to Professor J in early 2023. He was excited about my PhD topic, which focused on discerning concepts of the “social good” in science and technology education. During our conversation, he told me, with a tinge of disappointment in his voice, “Scientists are driven by curiosity. It is our social responsibility as scientists to be curious. Science should serve society by pursuing knowledge, and it should be honest. They are not so curious anymore.”
In another interview with a PhD student from the same department, I heard a similar narrative. S asked me rhetorically, “How can we take our science into society?” “We have a problem with science communication. We can’t even understand each other’s work. Further, people here think that science is a ritual – like an instruction manual to be followed. They do everything the institution tells them, sacredly. No atmosphere of questioning or critical thinking. This is the basis of science, after all!”
The last excerpt that I want to highlight is my interview with Prof. R who was trained in Chemistry. He told me, “In my experience, science is kept alive through publications in very good journals.” He continued, “In my time, scientists used to go to the field and live there for a few years to study the area and think of how we can best help the people. Nowadays, nobody has the time or will to do this!”
What becomes striking in these accounts is that the ideal scientific subject has slipped out of view. They suggest a growing distance between contemporary students and the qualities once held as essential to scientific practice: curiosity, critical inquiry, and a willingness to engage deeply and immersive with problems. Even though they argue that the current disposition varies from the ideal, all three narratives suggest a common imagination of this “ideal.”
In contrast to the entrepreneurial and self-disciplined ethos cultivated in engineering education, the moral scientific subject is framed through a discourse that valorises curiosity, honesty, and societal engagement. Professor J’s observation that contemporary scientists are “not so curious anymore” gestures toward a perceived erosion of the ethical imperative inherent in scientific inquiry, suggesting that curiosity itself is construed as a moral responsibility rather than a neutral cognitive trait. Similarly, the PhD student S critiques the ritualisation of scientific practice, describing institutional adherence as “sacred” and indicative of an environment that suppresses questioning and critical reflexivity. Professor R’s reflections further historicize this transformation, contrasting the embodied, field-oriented practices of community-science with the present prioritisation of publication metrics, revealing how institutional structures mediate both the scope and the ethical orientation of scientific activity.
The above material does not propagate deterministic differences between science and technology, but rather introduces the “subject” as a reorientation in thinking about these differences. This is in no way to suggest that scientific practice is not mediated by market mechanisms or pressures of profit, or that engineering education is not invested in immersive problem solving or burdened by the environment of “publish or perish.” Rather, the argument that I seek to advance is that despite these overlapping contexts, what seems to emerge is a construction of an ideal within “elite” higher education institutes of technology and science, where there is a strong sense of what constitutes an engineer vs a scientist in the imagination of student and faculty subjects and the institutional narratives. This is merely a preliminary entry point to think through how these conceptions form a “social” and create networks of associations in the practice of science and of technology.
Engineers emerge as entrepreneurial, disciplined subjects shaped by productivity, self-regulation, and market-driven technical mastery. Elite training fuses expertise with a neoliberal ethic oriented toward efficiency and innovation. By contrast, my interlocutors portray the ideal scientist as grounded in curiosity, honesty, social responsibility, and critical engagement in pursuit of knowledge as a public good. Taken together, these contrasts invite us to reconsider how institutional imaginaries shape not only what science and technology are, but who their practitioners are permitted to become. Through probing these formations of the subject, I suggest, offers a productive entry point for STS to rethink the “S” and the “T” not as stable categories, but as evolving moral, epistemic, and organisational projects.
References:
Bröckling, Ulrich. 2016. The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject. London: Sage Publications.
Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Haraway, Donna. 1985.“A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 15, no. 2: 65–108.
Heidegger, Martin. 1954. The Question Concerning Technology. Garland Publishing.
Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Yogita Suresh is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence (SNIoE), Delhi NCR. Her PhD research involves an ethnographic study of an Indian Institute of Technology, examining how ideas of social good are shaped, negotiated, and reimagined within technical education. She is the convenor of this series, “Productive Disruptions”, and an Executive Member of the STS India Network.
