Event Description
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan will discuss the politics of immunity, knowledge formation about immune identities and their ‘capital’ or value, and how these ideas circulated historically in South Asia. It marks an effort to step away from disciplinary and institutional histories of immunity that have focused on laboratories and the bioscientific enterprise, and on immunology’s subjects. Her talk examines two case studies in the late colonial and post-colonial Indian context, compares and analyzes how understandings of immunity were interpreted socially and epidemiologically, how they involved measuring and managing productive bodies, and what can this tell us about the nature of the colonial and post-colonial politics of the body and capital? The aim of this talk is to analyze immunity in the South Asian context, as representing a chronic and contingent instability and stress between bodily defensiveness and susceptibility and risks. she will trace how immunity and infections were ‘translated’ and mediated through pedagogical devices (plague primers, health tracts and other survey tools in social, psychiatry and occupational health). Finally, this talk offers a framing to better understand post-colonial governmentality in health in Asia, and its symbolism, promise and limits for citizens.
Event Speaker
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Co-Leader of the Global Histories of Science Research Cluster at Columbia University
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. For more information, please visit the event webpage. Hosted by the Harvard University Asia Center.
