Re-orienting the Lens: A Reflexive Account of Entering STS 

Rishabh Kachroo  

Image Description: Vaccine Preparation (historical photograph, on display at the Haffkine Institute, Mumbai, India)

Image Credits: Clicked by Rishabh Kachroo, 19 October 2023. Used with permission.

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.

Introduction 

My path to Science and Technology Studies (STS) has not been an intentional, carefully laid intellectual one. No one moment opened my eyes. There was no canonical text that lit the cartoon-ish lightbulb hovering over my head in a eureka moment. I encountered STS over a period of time during a moment of global rupture. It was a time when science itself had become the subject of fierce public debate, political mobilisation, and institutional anxiety. 

When I began my doctoral work, the questions I was asking were framed, in part, by my prior academic lives. With one degree in Biotechnology and another in International Relations and Area Studies, I had straddled two very different knowledge frameworks which by themselves were not quite equipped to help me understand what was unfolding during the COVID-19 pandemic in India: how efficacy was being debated on news panels, how people doubted science without rejecting it, and how the State was using the language of protection as both reassurance and discipline. 

I did not yet know the vocabulary and grammar, but I was already living the kinds of questions they raised. Why was one form of knowledge treated as legitimate and another dismissed? Why were the heterogeneous publics being portrayed as either rational acceptors or irrational conspiracists? These were political and deeply situated questions. Question that demanded a kind of sensibility that almost forced me to look closely at the entanglements between science, technology, and society.

Unlearning Certainty 

My undergraduate education in Biotechnology trained me to see that knowledge was built through evidence, replication, and peer-reviewed consensus. There was little room for ambiguity. Efficacy, when discussed in a virology class, for instance, meant something measurable, objective, and universal. Public scepticism, on the rare occasion that it came up in a Bioethics class, was framed as ignorance. 

Years later, during my doctoral work, I would encounter a framework like the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), which would show me that interpretations of technologies are shaped by the social groups that engage with them, and their trajectories are influenced as much by culture and politics as by design and engineering. This would result in me revisiting th very concepts I had been trained to take for granted. The more I engaged with SCOT, the more I realised that STS was offering a way to situate technology in a historical, political, and social manner. 

Boundary-work was everywhere. Scientists I spoke to drew lines between “real expertise” and “noise,” often locating the homogenous public on the wrong side of reason. Meanwhile, the heterogeneous publics engaged in boundary-work of their own, deciding whom to trust, what sources to believe, and how to interpret silence as much as speech. Trust, I soon realised, was continuously negotiated, withdrawn, and performed.  

Fieldwork as Theory 

My fieldwork began with an attempt to understand how people n India were responding to the COVID-19 vaccines. Why were some hesitant? Why did others comply uncritically? How were scientific messages being circulated,distorted, and re-appropriated? The documents I collected and analysed from the World Health Organisation (WHO) prequalification guidelines to national vaccine rollout protocols were instruments of governance that framed public expectations and responses. 

What I had initially imagined as data (interviews or policy documents) soon began to appear as dense sites of meaning. Their contradictions were a type of tug-of-war over truth, which I found myself mapping out not just as arguments, but as vocabularies. Terms like “efficacy,” “protection,” and “safety” appeared repeatedly, but never quite meant the same thing. It was in these moments that I realised I did not need to rely on theory to begin doing STS. The field itself was offering me what I needed. I simply had to let the field disturb the existing categories and teach me how knowledge circulated, how authority was crafted, and how publics made sense of science beyond the binaries of belief and denial. 

Few words featured as prominently in my fieldwork as “efficacy.” Yet despite its ubiquity, its meaning was never stable. Sometimes it referred to the results of a phase III trial. Sometimes it was shorthand for protection against death. At other times, it was invoked to discipline dissent and to shut down debate. It was through STS that I came to see “efficacy” not as a stable measure, but as a mobile signifier that was constantly being translated across institutional, scientific, and public domains.

Methodological Turning Points 

A major transformative moment in my doctoral journey was letting go of the comfort of variables. Beyond the obvious rigour of the scientific method during my undergraduate years, even the training in International Relations was imbued with ways of ideating and theorising seemingly borrowed from the natural sciences. I was trained to think in terms of dependent and independent variables, causal pathways, and testable hypotheses. The expectation was to impose some structure to reduce the social to the manageable. To make it easier to study. To be able to predict. 

But the more I engaged with the discourse around vaccines, the less useful that structure became. It was through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that I found a methodological home. It offered a way to track how scientific authority was being asserted, challenged, and maintained across time and space. It allowed me to see regulatory decisions as acts of power, persuasion, and exclusion. I was not testing a hypothesis. I was tracing how science was being spoken into legitimacy. I had to learn to sit with ambiguity—to read hedging, metaphor, and framing as active ingredients in meaning-making.  This shift did not mean abandoning rigour. Instead, it demanded a different kind of discipline: one rooted in close reading, in listening for absences, and in understanding context. 

Relearning Science from STS 

Looking back, I now see that I had to relearn science. Not because I had misunderstood it earlier, but because I had only ever seen one face of it. STS revealed its many other faces: the political one, the contested one, the negotiated one. 

Mine was not a linear transition from one discipline to another. My academic background did not suddenly become irrelevant. STS helped me hold these trajectories together with an entirely different grammar that allowed me to stay with complexity, to read uncertainty not as failure but as data, and to ask better questions about how knowledge circulates, materialises, and governs. For those entering STS from unexpected places—perhaps from the law, from engineering, from diplomacy, or from policy—it is not always crystal clear how one “belongs.” But perhaps STS is not really about belonging. Maybe it is more about staying with the trouble.   

Rishabh Kachroo is an independent researcher whose work sits at the intersection of Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS), International Relations, and public health. His PhD thesis, completed at Shiv Nadar IoE Deemed to be University, examined the negotiation of the publics’ understanding of vaccines and vaccination in India by the state, scientific community, and multiple publics. More broadly, he is interested in the politics of scientific authority, the governance of risk and uncertainty, ways in which “publics” emerge around scientific controversies, and critical International Relations.