Give Dwai Banerjee Credit: He does not choose easy -to -study subjects.
Banerjee is a MIT scholar who, in a short time, has produced a wide range of work on the impact of technology on society – and which, as a formed anthropologist, has a lively eye for the lived experience of people.
In a book, “Entring Cancer”, from 2020, Banerjee studies the lives of patients with cancer mainly poor in Delhi, by digging their psychological horizons and their interactions with the world of medical care. Another book, “Hematologies”, also from 2020, co-written with anthropologist Jacob Copeman, examines common blood ideas in Indian society.
And in another book still, to come later this year, Banerjee explores the history of computer science in India – including the attempt of some to generate growth thanks to interior advances, even if global IT companies put the industry on a fairly different foot.
“I like to have the freedom to explore new subjects,” explains Banerjee, associate professor of the MIT program in science, technology and society (STS). “For some people, relying on their previous work is the best, but I need new ideas to move forward. For me, it seems more natural to me. You are invested in a subject for a while and try to get out everything. ”
What largely connects these disparate subjects is that Banerjee, in his work, is a popular person: he aims to shed light on the life and thoughts of everyday citizens while they interact with the technologies and systems of contemporary society.
After all, a diagnosis of cancer can change life not only in physical terms, but psychologically. For some, having cancer creates “a feeling of being not moored previous certainties on oneself and its place in the world”, as Banerjee writes in “Sustainable cancer”.
The technology that allows diagnoses does not meet all our human needs, so the book retraces the complicated inner life of patients, and a changing medical system to meet the challenges of psychological and palliative care. Technology and society interact beyond successful products, as the book skillfully indicates.
For his research and teaching, Banerjee received from the mandate to MIT last year.
Fall for the humanities
Banerjee grew up in Delhi and, as a academic student, he expected to work in computer science, before changing the course.
“I was going to go to higher education for computer engineering,” explains Banerjee. “Then I just fell in love with the human sciences and I studied the human and social sciences.” He received an MPHIL and a master’s degree in sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, then registered as a doctoral student at New York University.
In Nyu, Banerjee undertook doctoral studies in cultural anthropology, while performing part of the field work which has constituted the basis of “sustainable cancer”. At the same time, he found that the people he studied were surrounded by history – shaping the technologies and politicians they encountered and shaping their own thought. In the end, even Banerjee’s anthropological work has a strong historical dimension.
After obtaining his doctorate, Banerjee became a Mellon scholarship holder in the human sciences of Dartmouth College, then joined the Faculty of MIT in STS. It is a logical house for someone who thinks largely and uses several research methods, from land to archives.
“I sometimes wonder if I am an anthropologist or if I am a historian,” allows BaNajee. “But it is an interdisciplinary program, so I try to make the most of this.”
Indeed, the STS program is based on many areas and methods, with its academics and students linked by the desire to rigorously examine the factors shaping the development and application of technology – and, if necessary, to initiate difficult discussions on the effects of technology.
“It is the history of the domain and the MIT department, that it is a kind of moral screen,” explains Banerjee.
Find an inspiration
As for the origin of Banerjee’s books of books, he does not just seek big problems on which to write, but things that trigger his intellectual and moral sensitivities – like disadvantaged cancer patients in Delhi.
“The” sustainable cancer “, in my mind, is a kind of traditional text of medical anthropology, which has come to find the inspiration of these people, and to run with as much as I could,” explains Banerjee.
Alternatively, “” hematologies “have come out of a collaboration, a conversation with Jacob Copeman, with us speaking of things and we are training,” adds Banerjee. “Intellectual friendship has become an engine.” Copeman is now an anthropologist of the Faculty of the University of Santiago de Compostela, in Spain.
Regarding Banerjee’s next book on IT in India, the spark was partly its own pleasure of seeing the internet reaching the country, facilitated that these were unequal dialogue mode and other tools that were careful.
“It comes from an old obsession,” says Banerjee. “When the Internet had just happened, at that time, when something exploded, it was exciting. This project is (partly about it) to recover my early pleasure from what was a really exciting period.”
The subject of the book itself is, however, prior to the commercial internet. On the contrary, Banerjee tells the story of IT during the first decades of India after having reached the independence of Great Britain in 1947. Even in the 1970s, the Indian government was interested in creating a strong national computer sector, designing and manufacturing its own machines. Finally, these efforts were faded and the giants of multinational computers took a market right in India.
The book details how and why it happened, in the process of recasting what we think we know about India and technology. Today, Note Banerjee, India is an exporter of skilled technological talents and an importer of technological tools, but it was not predestined. It is more than the idea of an autonomous technological sector in the country met the dominant forces of globalization.
“The book retraces this moment of this great confidence in the country’s ability to do these things, by producing manufacturing and jobs and economic growth, then it retraces the decline of this vision,” explains Banerjee.
“One of the objectives is that it is a book that can be read,” adds Banerjee. In this sense, the principle guiding its interests now guides its learned production: first people.