A Lecture by Jahnavi Phalkey, Moderated by Ravi Agarwal
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan
Bruno Latour in his Politics of Nature (1999/ tr. 2004) has argued that “political ecology has nothing to do with nature”. Sheila Jassanoff in her Designs on Nature (2005) has argued that “biology and politics have converged today across much of the industrialised world.” A recent translation of Latour’s essay In favour of a dialogue between political science and Science Studies (2008/ tr. 2023), tells us more about his thinking on Science Studies as possibly the new political science. Phalkey will present her response to these arguments as part of an academic debate and also explore their relevance to curatorial work.
Jahnavi Phalkey is a historian of science and technology. She is the Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. The 140,000 sq. ft. gallery is among the most ambitious public engagement projects in India and seeks to ‘bring science back into culture’. Prior to founding Asia’s first Science Gallery, Phalkey was tenured faculty at King's College London and has also been a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Berlin. She was an external curator at the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. She is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She is also director and producer of the documentary film, Cyclotron.
Ravi Agarwal has an interdisciplinary practice as a photographer/ artist, environmental campaigner, writer and curator. His work has been shown widely in museums and international biennials. He is also the founder of the environmental NGO Toxics Link, and The Shyama Foundation’s Shared Ecologies program which promotes art and ecology practices. His latest photobook is The Power Plant – fragments in time (2023), and he is Co- Convenor of the forthcoming Bergen Assembly 2025.
Knowledge Partner: Shared Ecologies
Details
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan
3, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Near Vakil Lane New Delhi 110001 India