Santosh Kumar
Image Credits: Santosh Kumar
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.
Each winter in North India, especially in cities like Delhi, the familiar crisis of smog returns. Residents complain of stinging eyes, burning throats, and endless coughs, while news headlines warn of “emergency” air quality levels. Yet, despite the dramatic visibility of pollution, political action remains fragmented and short-lived. Why does a problem that everyone breathes remain so politically elusive? This question lies at the heart of my research, which brings together air pollution, epigenetics, and public health in northern India. Working within Science and Technology Studies (STS), I approach air pollution not simply as an environmental or biomedical fact, but as a sociotechnical and political problem: one whose visibility, urgency, and meaning are shaped by epistemic practices, institutional logics, and imaginaries of governance.
Methodological Pathways
The research relies on discourse analysis to trace how knowledge of pollution is produced, circulated, and disputed across scientific publications, government reports, and media narratives. But it is also influenced by STS calls to treat air not just as an object of measurement, but as a relational substance whose meaning is co-produced across science, technology, and everyday life.
Nerea Calvillo’s (2018) work on political airs is particularly helpful in this context. She urges us to attend to the practices of “attuned sensing,” how air is encountered through devices, sensors, and apps rather than solely through embodied experience. In Delhi, the “bad air” is often felt first through smartphone AQI alerts, before it is smelled or inhaled. This mediated sensing shapes both the perception of crisis and the political vocabulary available to address it. Similarly, Rohit Negi (2020) shows that urban air is inseparable from infrastructures of inequality. Exposures are not distributed evenly; while some can afford air purifiers or temporary escape, others, construction workers, street vendors, and the urban poor, face daily exposure without reprieve. This urban ecology of exposure reframes pollution as a matter of political economy as much as atmospheric science. Awadhendra Sharan (2021) pushes this further by showing how domestic environments and urban atmospheres bleed into one another. The smoke of stoves, the soot of roads, and the haze of climate change coverage in ways that unsettle neat distinctions between “indoor” and “outdoor” air. These methodological framings, discourse analysis, attuned sensing, and attention to everyday ecologies allow us to see air as simultaneously technical, political, and lived.
Air and Health in Postgenomic Times
The link between air pollution and health is increasingly studied at the molecular scale through epigenetics. Epigenetics, as Meloni and Teesta (2014) explain, investigates how environmental exposures leave chemical marks on DNA, modifying gene expression and shaping vulnerability to disease. In Delhi, studies have suggested that particulate matter (PM2.5, PM10) leaves such traces on bodies, with possible intergenerational effects. Here, the probabilistic logic of epigenetics becomes crucial. As Lappé et al. (2024) observe, although epigenetics blurs the line between “nature” and “nurture,” its framing often reverts to biological determinism. Health is recast as a matter of probability, where risks are calculated rather than certainties declared. In Delhi’s case, the molecular traces of pollution are presented not as immediate illness but as probabilistic risks for future generations.
This logic is ethically ambiguous. Charles Dupras and Vardit Ravitsky (2016) describe this as the “ambiguous nature of epigenetic responsibility.” On one hand, epigenetics opens possibilities for collective responsibility – polluted air is framed as a shared environmental risk. On the other hand, it tends to individualise responsibility, urging people to adjust diets, lifestyles, or exposure practices to mitigate uncertain risks. The result is a neoliberal responsibility: everyone is implicated, but no one is fully accountable.
Peter Jackson’s (1994) study of passive smoking offers a useful comparison. In the 1980s, knowledge about second-hand smoke emerged not as a neutral fact but through political negotiation, where evidence had to be produced, contested, and stabilised before regulation could occur. Air pollution in Delhi faces a similar challenge: everyone breathes it, but the categories of victim, culprit, and responsibility are less easily drawn.
The Trouble of Making Air Visible
Part of the difficulty lies in the elusive nature of air. Vasundhara Bhojvaid and Annika Capelán (2021) argue that air resists being “sited.” Unlike water or soil, which can be sampled at a point, air leaks, circulates, and shifts across spaces. This makes accountability slippery: where does one locate the pollution, and who can be blamed? This elusiveness has a long history. Harish Naraindas (1996), tracing the genealogy of tropical medicine, shows how colonial science associated “bad air,” decay, and climate with pathology. Air was not just a biomedical matter but a terrain of governance and global inequality. Today, while technologies of measurement have changed, AQI dashboards, molecular assays, the challenge remains: how to render air politically actionable rather than simply measurable.
In India, the National Air Quality Index provides daily data, and media outlets constantly report AQI scores. Yet, as Sheila Jasanoff reminds us through the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, the presence of data alone does not generate political urgency. For many Delhi residents, struggling with everyday survival, AQI updates become background noise rather than mobilising their own embodied sensations of breathlessness or fatigue. This is what I call “framing the invisible.” Air pollution is simultaneously hyper-visible, thick smog, daily headlines, while invisible, reduced to probabilities, numbers, and molecular signals.
Reflections
Studying air pollution through STS requires methodological labour across disciplines. Air is a chemical substance, a sensory experience, a molecular inscription, and a political claim, all at once. It demands moving between laboratories, policy archives, and the streets of Delhi.By situating air within these entanglements, we can begin to understand why pollution in India and globally remains politically fragmented. Epigenetics and AQI data make air scientifically visible, but they also render it abstract, probabilistic, and difficult to translate into collective political action. Finally, the challenge is not to measure polluted air but to frame it as a crisis that compels responsibility. Until then, Delhi’s residents will continue to live with air that is both unavoidable and strangely invisible.
References:
Bhojvaid, V., & Capelán, A. (2024). Siting the un-sitable: Conceptualising air through contamination across two remote field sites. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 58(3), 333-359.
Calvillo, N. (2018). Political airs: From monitoring to attuned sensing air pollution. Social studies of science, 48(3), 372-388.
Dupras, C., & Ravitsky, V. (2016). The ambiguous nature of epigenetic responsibility. Journal of Medical Ethics, 42(8), 534-541.
Jackson, P. W. (1994). Passive smoking and ill‐health: practice and process in the production of medical knowledge. Sociology of Health & Illness, 16(4), 423-447.
Lappé, M., Fahey, F. F., & Hein, R. J. (2024). Epigenomic stories: Evidence of harm and the social justice promises and perils of environmental epigenetics. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 49(3), 673-697.
Meloni, M., & Testa, G. (2014). Scrutinizing the epigenetics revolution. BioSocieties, 9(4), 431.
Naraindas, H. (1996). Poisons, putrescence and the weather: A genealogy of the advent of tropical medicine. Contributions to Indian sociology, 30(1), 1-35.
Negi, R. (2020). Urban air. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 40(1), 17-23.
Sharan, A. (2021). Domestic environments, urban air and climate change. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 55(3), 373-391.
Santosh Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi, India. His research interests include Science, Technology, and Society (STS), the sociology of medicine, and the sociology of education. His recent work examines how environmental facts are produced in scientific laboratories, with a particular focus on the sociological dimensions of epigenetics. He can be reached at Email: santoshkumar@knc.du.ac.in, on X/Twitter at @serene_santosh.
