Is Science and Technology Studies (STS) decolonial? Positing such a question may, understandably, seem strange. Am I suggesting that STS was and/or is colonial and it now needs to be decolonial? How can a field of study, and that too STS, which espouses contingency and cultural specificity of scientific knowledge, be colonial? If one was to press further the issue that the above question raises is even more fundamental – Don’t the analytical tools of STS, such as hybrids and monsters, which allowed us to move beyond longstanding divides between nature/culture and humans/non-humans, also constitute decolonial interventions? In this presentation I argue that in spite of very important interventions for the study of postcolonial aspects of sciences, STS often remains entrapped within colonial discourses.
Amit Prasad is an Associate Professor in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of Imperial Technoscience.
