Sarkar Speaks at Harvard STS Circle on India’s Nuclear Program
On November 30, 2020, Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, presented her research on the history of India’s nuclear program at Harvard University’s Science, Technology and Society (STS) Circle.
Her talk, titled “Ploughshares and Swords: Technopolitics and Geopolitics in India’s Nuclear Program,” is based on her first book that is currently under contract to be published by Cornell University Press. The book recounts how the stakeholders of India’s nuclear program pursued freedom of action by prioritizing certain kinds of technologies and technological systems over others, and how those choices often entrapped the nuclear program by serving ulterior motives, leading to institutional infighting, and even devolving into personal bickering.
The Harvard STS Circle is co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Details of the event can be found on the Harvard STC Circle website.
Jayita Sarkar is Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, where she is also the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She teaches diplomatic and political history at graduate and undergraduate levels. Professor Sarkar’s areas of research expertise are 20th century South Asia, history of U.S. foreign relations, politics of nuclear technologies, and connected partitions. Her book, Ploughshares & Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, (Forthcoming, Cornell University Press, 2022), examines the first forty years of India’s nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics. Read more about Professor Sarkar on her faculty profile.