Science, Technology and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard (via Zoom)

Date: 

Monday, November 30, 2020, 12:15pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Online Only

“Ploughshares and Swords: Technopolitics and Geopolitics in India’s Nuclear Program”

Attend this event via Zoom (advance registration required)

Speaker:

Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University.

Contact:

Paul Sherman
paul_sherman@hks.harvard.edu

Co-sponsored by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.

This event is online only. Please click the "Read More" link for full instructions on how to attend this seminar.

Chair:

Sheila JasanoffFaculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Remote Access Information:

To join by computer:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSduDex5bm5Oa9lp6z30zBOKxcodi171rmBi-rF6BQH-h681LA/viewform

Please note: This event requires registration by noon on Friday, November 27 to receive the meeting link and password.

Abstract:

Ploughshares and Swords is the history of India’s nuclear program from its beginnings in the 1940s to the 1980s when the program readapted to national, regional, and global pressures. It recounts how the stakeholders of India’s nuclear program pursued freedom of action by prioritizing certain kinds of technologies and technological systems over others, and how those choices often entrapped the nuclear program by serving ulterior motives, leading to institutional infighting, and even devolving into personal bickering. Even though the stakeholders’ pursuit of freedom of action led to a large dual-use nuclear program that could concurrently serve the national goals of security and development, India’s nuclear program remained a patchwork of different reactor models that often produced neither electricity from nuclear energy nor fissile material for nuclear weapons. Instead, it bled the state coffers, uprooted people, and resulted in public health catastrophes.

Speaker Bio:

Jayita Sarkar is an Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, where she teaches diplomatic and political history. She is the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative at BU’s Pardee School. Her expertise is in 20th century South Asia, history of U.S. foreign relations, nuclear technologies, and connected partitions. Her first book, Ploughshares & Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, examines the first forty years of India’s nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics. It is under contract to be published with Cornell University Press. In 2020-21, she is an Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, and a Weatherhead Initiative on Global History Fellow at Harvard to work on her second book project entitled, “Light Water Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of U.S. Global Power.”