17th Anna Mani Lecture by Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey: 09th December 2023, Saturday at 4.00 pm
YouTube live stream link: https://youtu.be/nexQavENX34
Title: “From Circumspect Technocrat to Committed Radical: Ward Morehouse on Administering Knowledge for Development”
Abstract: A prominent political activist, educationist, and publisher in the United States, Ward Morehouse was the founder of the Council on International and Public Affairs (CIPA) and co-founder, with Richard Grossman, of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). Morehouse and Grossman were some of the first activists to denounce the concept of “corporate personhood” in their Rethinking Democracy Workshops. In India, Morehouse is best known and remembered most for his association with the legal battle following a gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal (1984). Morehouse provided an assessment of key decisions on institution building, science policy, science education and the role of science in India’s development that were taken in the first twenty years after India's independence. He showed us the institutional landscape of science through an iterative dialogue with scientists and high-ranking science administrators. Morehouse’s work is as a witness of its time, as a source to better understand the conversations behind the faith in science and technology for development in India.
About the Speaker: Jahnavi Phalkey, Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru, did her PhD in history of science and technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. She was Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin, an external curator to the Science Museum London, and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. She held a tenured faculty position at King’s College London, and is currently the Sir Asutosh Mukherjee Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies. Jahnavi is the author of "Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India" and has co-edited "Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century". She is on the Editorial Board for the British Journal for the History of Science and History and Technology. She was also the producer-director of the documentary film "Cyclotron". She is the winner of the Infosys Prize 2023 in Humanities.
