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“There are a lot of clichés to explain the importance of what we do,” says science historian Jahnavi Faruqui. One such expression is at least accurate. “‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.’ If you don’t ask specific questions or want to know, you’re known and your life is yours. It will be shaped in a way that we didn’t want it to be,” says Faruqui.
The climate crisis is an example of how seemingly distant science and technology can change the world of individuals. Evolving biomedical technology is another.
“How we want to engage with gene editors, CRISPR-Cas, is an important question. And how strongly our world is shaped by engineering and scientific research, and how rapidly these fields are changing. It is more important than ever to ask these questions because we are evolving.”
Faruqui’s previous research has focused on the history and evolution of three specific areas: aerodynamics, statistics, and nuclear power programs.
She was recently awarded the Infosys Award in Humanities for her work in that last field. In her research paper and her 2013 book Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India, she examines India’s nuclear program in a postcolonial context. Her work “interweaves the world history of science, particularly nuclear science, with the anthropology of postcolonial nations,” the Infosys citation says.
For example, her book examines the role of the state in supporting and organizing early research in fields where it is impossible to separate politics from the laboratory. It questions the relationship between individual scientists and political leaders, and between science managers and state bureaucrats. We explore how their decisions shaped the structure of the country’s elite scientific research and policy today.
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Faruqui says that long before he found his niche, he was driven by a desire to answer questions about why our constructed world looks the way it does.
Growing up in Amaravati in Andhra Pradesh and then in Mumbai as the son of a university lecturer inspired her to graduate in political science. She will complete her MA in Asian and African Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She then began working on her PhD on the political economy of silent films in India at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 1998.
Regarding the film, she says, “I was exploring what you might call the political economy of new technology, and questions of representation and identity on screen.” But Faruqui was now looking for a greater purpose in her work. She said, “I knew I had to do something different, but I didn’t necessarily know what that new path would be.”
In 2000, a research program in the history of science was launched at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. “I decided to take a chance. If that didn’t work out, I was going to take advantage of the scholarship that was being offered at Sciences Po in Paris,” she says.
It worked. Faruqui finds himself exploring some of the biggest questions we have in a variety of ways. This includes thinking, “What could I have done differently?” She began researching the beginnings of experimental nuclear physics in India when she was deciding on a topic for her Ph.D. at Georgia Tech.
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Faruqui says her next book will be rooted in her research on the history of statistical sampling in India. On the other hand, she interacts with her target audience in a rather unexpected way.
Since 2018, Faruqui has been the founding director of Science Gallery, Bangalore. The Science Gallery is a nonprofit facility established as part of the Science Gallery Network, which partners with universities and governments around the world to foster public engagement in science.
“Currently, we are holding a banana tasting festival in our gallery. We are learning about how biodiversity is declining, how we have made industrial and agricultural choices, and how they are affecting plants and animals. and how it has affected nutrition, and then climate change,” Faruqui says. The gallery also conducts experiments, hosts film screenings, and develops a number of open source games.
This space inspires her to engage with what’s happening in the moment, hint at questions, and enjoy stepping back and watching the dots connect in the minds of others, “like a good historian.” Faruqui says it will give you.
In her spare time, she studies how India, a pioneer in statistical sampling in the mid-20th century, lost its dominance in the field.
“At the time of independence, India, like China, faced the same problem of reliable data for policy making,” she says. “China has followed the census path, as Arnab Ghosh brilliantly demonstrates in Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (2020). I started my sampling journey based on methods developed by major companies such as Mahalanobis and CR Rao.”
Mahalanobis’ method became the basis of the newly established National Sample Survey Organization. “Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics, once said, “Where Mahalanobis and India led, the rest of the world has followed, and most countries now have up-to-date household income or expenditure surveys.” The only thing most countries can envy India for is its statistical capacity.” Indian statisticians say key institutions in the field don’t seem to be functioning as well as they used to. Probably. “India’s statistical structure has deteriorated over the last few decades,” Faruqui said. My goal is to trace the duties, ideas and methods that shaped this enviable ability, and what happened in the world of numbers in the years that followed. ”
In this as-yet-untitled book, Phalkey also aims to take readers behind the scenes and show how important macro data is generated. She says she wants people to really understand why numbers can’t be seen outside of the landscape and context that produced them. Her book hopes to serve as a kind of field guide to these worlds. “So that the next time someone throws out a number, the reader will understand it well enough to point out that the number itself is never an argument,” she says.
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