Annapurna Mamidipudi: Three Stories and a Proposition: Innovation Theories from Handloom Weaving in India
The Science and Technology in Asia online seminar series @ Harvard is pleased to invite you to our next session on Tuesday, September 24, 10:30–11:45 am ET.
Our speaker is Annapurna Mamidipudi, and the details of her talk are as follows:
THREE STORIES AND A PROPOSITION:
INNOVATION THEORIES FROM HANDLOOM WEAVING IN INDIA
Innovation as an organising principle has legitimacy in both science and social studies of science and technology. Known as science and technology, knowledge is now owned as intellectual property, innovation by definition is useful knowledge in the market, that can circulate in the economy. I add to this definition of innovation recent learning that traces new ideological commitments that justify innovation as the central organizing principle in technoscientific governance too, that would entail taking democratic politics equally (alongside technoscience) as an explicit site of symmetrical analysis.
As a thought experiment, I take up how innovation works as an organising principle through reinforcing Science, Economy and Democracy as counting devices. Thus, I explore what would happen if we think of Science, Economy and Democracy as following a central logic of counting in a linear numerical system, that legitimates innovation, services capitalism and becomes the only instrument by which our knowledge progresses in time.
My own case is in handloom weaving past and present, that allows for a critical approach to innovation for thinking about ownership of [new] knowledge. While generally such knowledge is named as tacit, because it is unalienable from social bodies, I narrate three stories from my field site, of owning craft knowledge where numbers always come attached to bodies and materials. This I will argue is critical to sustainability of our societies, knowledges and environments.
About our speaker: Annapurna Mamidipudi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Technical University of Berlin, with a DFG [German Research Foundation] -funded project on epistemologies of craft, examining the role of material innovation in making color expertise. A recent project focused on comparing weaving in ancient Greece and India and translating knowledge between academic and weaving practices. She is a trustee of the Handloom Futures Trust in India where she works with craftspeople, activists and academics on epistemologies of material cultures. She is co-editor (with Dagmar Schӓfer and Marius Buning) of the volume Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) (open access).
Zoom registration: https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia
We hope you will be able to join us for this and subsequent talks, listed below:
+ October 8 | Karine Chemla | “Historiography and History of Mathematical Symbolism: A View from Chinese Sources”
+ October 15 | Amit Prasad | “Contestations over Stem Cell Ethics and the US-China Tech War: What Should We Do with Their Orientalist and Colonial Framing?”
+ October 29 | Dafna Zur | “How to Talk to Martians: Socialist vs. Capitalist Science in Korean SF”
+ November 12 | Fei Huang | “Bathing through Time and Landscape: A Longue Durée History of Hot Springs in China (1000–1945)”
+ November 26 | Sulfikar Amir | “Living in a Hot City: Urban Heat Mitigation in Informal Settlements in Megacity Jakarta”
+ December 3 | Togo Tsukahara | “Environmental History in Transnational Networks: Climate History Described by Rangaku, Dutch Navy, and Japan’s Colonial Meteorology”
More information at https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia.