Ranjith Kallyani
Image Description: From the Panel “Envi 5” at the first STS-India Network Conference, O.P. Jindal Global University
I have written many post-conference notes earlier. However, the very first thought I encountered while typing this one, unlike the earlier ones, is to find a different language than that of LinkedIn, where people are always ‘excited,’ ‘privileged,’ and ‘honoured.’ I am certainly all of those things. However, my feelings are far more layered than the plastic, AI-generated sentiments that circulate online these days. I feel grateful and moved, irrespective of whether I translate those feelings into a LinkedIn post. Now, my deliberate human effort to sound human while I, as a human typing this note, justifies what I am writing here about- my experience of being part of the First STS India Network Conference, held in the National Capital Region from 14 to 17 December.
When we inhabit a world that is complexly shaped by various forms of science and technology (S&T), it is no longer reasonable to treat them as neutral backdrops to social life. They demand to be taken seriously as analytical entry points of our enquiries. This necessity that we feel from our day-to-day-ness raises questions about some disciplinary traditions that would help us consider S&T as analytical categories. This also raises a simultaneous question about turning the critical spirit of the social sciences towards understanding S&T not as passive and “asocial” factors but as active agents that shape social and political lives. The question about the disciplinary tradition further takes us to another limitation about the geopolitical intersection of the epistemic hierarchies that is often represented with the neologism “Bruno-Donna-Sheila”- a shorthand reference to the canonical influence of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Sheila Jasanoff in shaping dominant STS frameworks and the Euro-American centrism of STS theory. Now, the revised question must treat India as a different analytical category, more than a geographical and political entity. However, this shall not lead to foregrounding India as a rhetorical or parochial category, but as a lived geography that reminds us to remain attentive to the internal diversities, inequalities, and historical specificities that complicate any singular invocation of India.
The First STS India Network Conference must be understood primarily against this broader backdrop. The conference invoked a deliberate attempt to develop a shared conceptual language for articulating the multiple, historically sedimented interconnections among science, technology, society, and India. In this sense, the conference was a linguistic and epistemic intervention that sought to do justice to each word in its title. Even the title of the conference appears as a product of careful deliberation where each term – STS, India, Network, and Conference – carried distinct theoretical commitments and political sensibilities. For instance, the term ‘network’ – according to one of the most influential strands of STS – are sites where humans and non-humans co-constitute one another as agents. Though the usage of the term doesn’t represent the network of actants in the conference title, it highlights the aspect of forging relationships.
The other term ‘conference’ is also quite evocative here. This was a conference that raised pertinent questions about its own format- the act and event of people coming together as part of an epistemic (and affective) effort. At a time when academic gatherings are increasingly reduced to administrative nodes spaces for the performance of expertise, institutional branding, and the accumulation of scientometric value – this conference sought to reclaim what the STS scholars call as a fractal. Rather than reproducing the familiar rhythms of academic productivity, the conference foregrounded questions about how scholars come together, how communities of inquiry are sustained, and how intellectual labour is valued. This note is therefore not merely a record of participation but an attempt to situate myself within an emerging network that aspires to reimagine the conditions under which STS scholarship in India might flourish. In that sense, more than a chronological milestone in the consolidation of S, T, and Society Studies (STS) in India, the conference is a deliberate intervention into the contemporary knowledge economy.
Being the first of its kind in India, the conference inevitably sets a precedent. In the linear sense of disciplinary consolidation, it is an event of significance. But it is also significant for the conceptual landscape it opens up. As STS scholars, we examine how knowledge is produced, stabilised, authorised, disseminated, and sustained. When people who make knowledge about knowledge come together, our individual and collective acts of inquiry also become objects of STS inquiry. There was a palpable awareness that many implicit aspects of our behaviour may one day be explicated by scholars from a similar or different temporality. To sit among people who study the social life of knowledge, knowing that our own practices might eventually be analysed sociologically and historically by another epistemic ‘big brother’ (the gendered usage is deliberate) was an interesting aspect of the conference. Besides this epistemic dimension of the act of conferencing, it is noteworthy that the conference took place at the centre of a series of conceptual and empirical dynamics of STS. In another way, the venue and time of the conference offer a series of STS research agendas – urban agglomerations, gentrification, university imaginaries, air pollution, the lived morphology of our academic spaces and whatnot! The conference unfolded amid rich empirical worlds that STS has always been attuned to.
I participated in the conference as a co-convener and speaker in a panel on epistemic uncertainties in environmental STS, and as a speaker in another panel on New and Emerging STS, where I presented my work on artificial intelligence. These different roles provided me with a chance to engage with the conference both as an organiser and as a contributor. How are these two kinds of labour are demarcated and differently valued in scientific communities are questions to be taken up separately in a different context. However, thoughts on organisation and participation as contributory expertise make one think about the conditions under which knowledge is produced and sustained. One of our panellists was based abroad, and we explored the possibility of their online participation. The organisers, however, firmly declined this option. This decision annoyed us initially. Nevertheless, once I was physically present at the conference, the reasoning behind it turned clearer and appreciable. Face-to-face presence matters. Collins’ (2022) The Face-to-Face Principleappeared as an empirically grounded insight. Here, the organisers’ preference for physical presence reflects an epistemic choice rather than a mere logistical consideration.
There were several moments during the conference when the organisers’ insistence on physical presence was justified. One such instance occurred during the only online session I happened to attend, which was, interestingly, on fractal margins. During Prof. Witharana’s recorded presentation, the projection screen generated literal geometric fractals of overlapping digital windows – an unintended visual metaphor that the organisers quickly corrected. While fractals originate in mathematics, in STS, they are used as a metaphor to describe the social sites where expertise resides and is reproduced through immersion and relational practices rather than formal instruction. The concept captures how epistemic processes replicate themselves across scales, from the ubiquitous to the esoteric, much like a cauliflower, where the same pattern appears whether one observes the whole or a single floret. In this instance, the mathematical fractals on the screen disrupted the epistemic fractals that the conference deliberately sought to cultivate. This minor incident, while accidental, foregrounded a broader orientation of the conference, where the boundary between organisational and epistemic labour became porous and difficult to maintain.
Any academic gathering that aspires to seriousness and critique is sustained by layers of labour that often remain invisible within conventional accounts of conferencing. I am therefore especially grateful to the organisers of the conference for their efforts to make the conference happen. I thank them for bringing the human back to the infrastructures of knowledge production. Their deliberate efforts to undo entrenched hierarchies – by enabling meaningful participation across career stages, institutional locations, and disciplinary orientations- created conditions under which genuine intellectual engagement could occur. Equally significant was a functional and proactive Internal Complaints Committee to enable spaces where people feel safe, which is not only an ethical concern alone but also an epistemic prerequisite.
The conference finds a serious place in our collective engagements with questions such as how can we reimagine academic coming together with a sense of wit, intimacy, and respect, both for what we do and for the people who do the same work? How can a community build itself slowly and meaningfully in a world that discredits slowness and shows little respect for meaningfulness? How do we move beyond scientometrics and bring humans back to knowledge-making, and to knowledge about knowledge-making? The conference provided the rich experience of knowing about knowledge together while simultaneously being the knowledge and the knower.
There are many people I must thank. Sony, for co-convening the panel on epistemic uncertainties; Anita, for presenting her work; and Manjima, who was part of the panel though she could not be physically present. I am grateful to Anup Dhar for his generous appreciation of our work and for chairing the panel, and to Eveleen for chairing the second panel where I presented my work on AI. My thanks also to Alokeparna and Sujal, the other speakers on the panel. I appreciate Ananthu and Tilak for coordinating the panels, and all those who posed thoughtful questions and comments. My gratitude to Shiju, Vidya, Yogita, Naveen, Pankaj, Mahendra and all the other organisers for their intellectual, physical, emotional, and many other forms of labour. I thank them for the magic that they displayed throughout, of doing things seriously while staying light-hearted.
The list of acknowledgements is necessarily incomplete. Many others contributed to making the conference possible but remain invisible in most of the formal vote of thanks sessions – those who cleaned the campus, prepared meals, drove vehicles, among others. A long-standing aspiration of this collective can be meaningful only when they receive the material and otherwise acknowledgements for their epistemic and otherwise labour. Attending to such labour is essential not only for fairness but also for sustaining the relational and social foundations upon which knowledge-making depends.
