SUMMER INSTITUTE

Pennsylvania State University

Department of Asian Studies

Decolonizing Science in Asia

June 13-June 17, 2016

Directors
Prakash Kumar, Projit Mukharji, Amit Prasad

June 12, 2016 Arrival in State College

Dinner at India Pavilion: 7 - 8.30 p.m.

June 13, 2016

Breakfast at Old Botany 8 9 a.m.

Opening Remarks by Directors

9 9.30 a.m.

Morning Seminar Re-thinking Objects(Jiang & Subramanian) 9.30 11 a.m.

1) Govindan Parayil, "The Green Revolution in India: A case study of
technological change," Technology and Culture.
2) Sigrid Schmalzer, Yuan Longping, the Intellectual Peasant (chapter)

Coffee break

Seminar II - Continuing discussion around Re-thinking Objects 11.15 12 pm

Working Lunch

Presentation Prof. Tina Chen, Editor, Verge

Early Afternoon Papers: 1 2.30 p.m.

Kapil Subramanian (School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science,
University of Leeds)
Tubewell Irrigation in Postwar India
Lijing Jiang (School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological
University
How the goldfish decolonized biology in China and how it did not

Coffee break

Late Afternoon Projects: 3 4.30 p.m.

1
Kapil Subramanian Revisiting the Green Revolution: Irrigation and Food
Production in Twentieth Century India
Lijing Jiang - Crafting Socialist Embryology: Dialectics, Communist Science, and
Aquaculture in Maoist China, 19501965

Dinner on your own

June 14, 2016

Breakfast at Old Botany 8 9.30 a.m.

Morning Seminar Geopolitics(Venkat, Banerji) 9.30 11 a.m.

1) Kaushik Sunder Rajan Life and Debt: Global and Local Political Ecologies
of Biocapital (chapter)
2) Amit Prasad "Imaginative Geography, Neoliberal Governmentality, and
Colonial Distinctions: Docile and Dangerous Bodies in Medical Transcription
Outsourcing" (with Srirupa Prasad), Cultural Geographies, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2012, p.
348-363.

Coffee break

Seminar II - Continuing discussion around Geopolitics 11.15 12 pm

Lunch

Early Afternoon Papers: 1 2.30 p.m.

Bharat Venkat (Program in Global Health, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton
University)
India after Antibiotics
Dwaipayan Banerji (Dartmouth College & MIT)
Markets and Molecules: A Pharmaceutical Primer from the South

Coffee break

Late Afternoon Projects: 3 4.30 p.m.

Bharat Venkat India after Antibiotics: Tuberculosis at the Limits of Cure
Dwaipayan Banerji - Living in Prognosis: Cancer and Pain in Contemporary Delhi

Dinner on your own

June 15, 2016

Breakfast at Old Botany 8 9.30 a.m.

Morning Seminar Making Subjects(Parrenas, Pearson) 9.30

11 a.m.

2
 1) Lugones, Mara. 2010. "Toward a Decolonial Feminism." Hypatia 25
(4):742-759.
2) Sergio Sismondo, "Ontological turns, turnoffs, and roundabouts," Social
Studies of Science 45, no. 3 (2015): 441-448.

Coffee break

Seminar II - Continuing discussion around Making Subjects 11.15 12 pm

Lunch

Early Afternoon Papers: 1 2.30 p.m.

Juno Parrenas (Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Ohio State University)
Hospice for a Dying Species
Trais Pearson (Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University)
Morbid Subjects: Forensic Medicine & Sovereignty in Siam

Coffee break

Late Afternoon Projects: 3 4.30 p.m.

Juno Parrenas Decolonizing Extinction: Orangutan Rehabilitation and the Work of
Care
Trais Pearson - Sovereign Necropolis: Death, Law, and Medicine in Bangkok

Dinner on your own

June 16, 2016

Breakfast at Old Botany 8 9.30 a.m.

Morning Seminar Translation(Barnes, Cleetus, Singh) 9.30

11 a.m.
1) Kuang-chi Hung, "Within the lungs, the stomach, and the mind:
convergences and divergences in the medical and natural histories of Gingko
biloba," in Howard Chiang, ed., Historical epistemology and the making of modern
Chinese medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 41-79.
2) Michael Dodson, Translating Science, Translating Empire (CSSH, 2005).

Coffee break

Seminar II - Continuing discussion around Translation 11.15 12

Lunch

Early Afternoon Papers: 1 2.45 p.m.

Nicole Barnes (History, Duke University)

3
The making of Sichuans great treasure house: How the war of resistance against
Japan (1937-45) changed Chinese medicine
Charu Singh (Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Vijn in the Public Sphere: Rethinking Diffusion in Colonial North India
Burton Cleetus (Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Intimate Encounter: Patient-Practitioner Relationship in an Ayurvedic Hospital in
South India, 1930-1960

No Break Please Bring Coffee to Seminar Room

Late Afternoon Projects: 2.45 4.30

Nicole Barnes China and the Making of Global Health
Charu Singh - Science for the People: Knowledge, Print and Popularization in
Colonial North India, c. 1890-1930
Burton Cleetus - Basel Mission, Health Initiatives and Local medical Traditions in
India

Dinner on your own

June 17, 2016

Breakfast at Old Botany 8 9.30 a.m.

Morning Seminar Geography(George, Li) 9.30 11 a.m.

1) Lei, Sean Hsiang-lin. Qi-Transformation and the Steam Engine: The
Incorporation of Western Anatomy and Re-Conceptualisation of the Body in
Nineteenth-Century Chinese Medicine. Asian Medicine 7, no. 2 (2014): 31957.
2) Necropolitics. Achille Mbembe, Public Culture, Vol. 15, Number 1, Winter
2003, pp.11-40.

Coffee break

Seminar II - Continuing discussion around Geography 11.15 12 pm

Lunch

Early Afternoon Papers: 1 2.30 p.m.

Lan Li (Presidential Scholar in Science and Neuroscience, Columbia University)
Ideal Forms: Mediating Meridians in Revolutionary China
Joppan George (History, Princeton University)
Governing with Bombs: Airpower on the Frontier of British India, 1916-1936

Coffee break

Late Afternoon Projects: 3 4.30 p.m.

4
Lan Li Intimate Cartographies: Body Maps and the Epistemic Encounter in China
and Britain, 1893-1985
Joppan George - Airborne Colony: Culture and Politics of Aviation in Late Colonial
India, 1910-1939

Wrap Up Directors (and all Participants)

4.30 - 5 p.m.

Dinner on your own