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Dwaipayan Banerjee
Enduring Cancer (Duke University Press, 2020)
In Enduring Cancer Dwaipayan Banerjee explores the efforts of Delhi's urban poor to create a livable life with cancer as patients and families negotiate an overextended health system unequipped to respond to the disease. Owing to long wait times, most urban poor cancer patients do not receive a diagnosis until it is too late to treat the disease effectively.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city's largest cancer care NGO and at India's premier public health hospital, Banerjee describes how, for these patients, a cancer diagnosis is often the latest and most serious in a long series of infrastructural failures. In the wake of these failures, Banerjee tracks how the disease then distributes itself across networks of social relations, testing these networks for strength and vulnerability. Banerjee demonstrates how living with and alongside cancer is to be newly awakened to the fragility of social ties, some already made brittle by past histories, and others that are retested for their capacity to support.
Hematologies
(w. Jacob Copeman, Cornell University Press 2019)
Hematologies examines how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life in north India in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Across a range of field sites, we trace how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities and activist practice. From anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as activist material to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, we show how tracing a 'bloodscape of difference' in the Indian body politic offers new entryways into thinking about politics and economy: different sovereignties, different proportionalities, different temporalities.
Computing in the Time of Decolonization
Computing in the Time of Decolonization, builds upon my previous work while venturing into new territories of inquiry. In my prior work, I advanced scholarly understandings of the politics of science, technology, and medicine in contemporary and colonial India. This new research historicizes the politics of scientific expertise and knowledge production by locating it within India’s postcolonial history.
Consequently, Computing in the Time of Decolonization explores the history of computing in India during the era of decolonization, a topic that has been largely neglected both in mainstream narratives of South Asia, as well as by historians of computing. In particular, this book charts the efforts of Indian scientists and engineers to build a self-reliant computer industry in the first two decades after the region’s decolonization.
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