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There has been growing recognition that Field-Configuring Events (FCEs) play a significant role in connecting stakeholders to shape the emergence of new technological fields. However, not many empirical studies in the literature on field configuring events have taken a middle ground by looking at the impact of the events and the extent to which the events facilitate multiple narratives around an emerging technological field. The other critical issue is that not all events create very fundamental changes in the field but are still useful in getting specific results and providing participants benefits such as new business opportunities. This paper integrates literature on field configuring events with the research on trade shows to study the emergence of smart grids in India. I highlight the role of the '' India Smart Grid Week 2016 '' as a business conference and forum for discussing relevant policy, regulatory and technological trends related to smart grids in India and for accelerating the deployment of smart grids. This paper focuses the extent to which the event facilitates multiple narratives around smart grids in India and the future impact of the event on smart grid deployment in India.
The sustainability transitions literature has emphasized the analytical challenges in understanding the trade-offs in protecting niche innovations. This paper builds on an emerging body of literature that argues that the concept of field-configuring events (FCE) is useful for understanding such trade-offs. We explore how this concept can be fruitful for analysis of niche protection in solar PV technology in India. The paper finds two important focal points of debate: (1) supporting domestic capabilities to improve competitiveness; and (2) using public financial mechanisms efficiently. Our research suggests that, whilst FCEs indeed seem an appropriate venue for investigating ongoing debates in niche protection, it is challenging to develop causal relationships between these events and their wider, field-level influence. As such, the paper reflects conceptually on the usefulness of the notion of FCEs as temporally and spatially bounded venues for analysis of emerging niche trajectories and their politics.
The objective of the dissertation is to explore the role of heterogeneous actors and their collective strategies in transforming institutional structures associated with incumbent fossil fuel energy system and shaping sustainable energy transitions in India. Empirically the dissertation focuses on development of wind and solar PV energy in India. The dissertation's conceptual foundation is built on a systematic literature review of sustainability transitions and sociological approaches in management studies specially literature on collective institutional entrepreneurship. Methodologically the dissertation takes a qualitative case study approach and uses archival data sources, semi-structured interviews and participant observations in forums and conferences collected during field work in India. By considering insights from the different empirical chapters, a simple typology of three overarching collective strategies which actors use in attempting to transform institutional structures associated with incumbent energy system is developed. These collective institutional strategies include: (1) Institutional adaptation focusing on experimenting within institutional constraints and outside institutional constraints in protective spaces; (2) Institutional capacity building focusing on building new indigenous capabilities by drawing on transnational linkages; and (3) Institutional transformation focusing on deliberate attempt at transforming institutional arrangements through discursive battles between heterogeneous actors in forums. By developing this typology, the dissertation contributes towards recent debates on micro-foundations of sustainability transitions which relates to closer focus on the role of actors and their strategies on shaping socio-technical systems. Finally the dissertation points to ways of steering and maneuvering sustainability transitions by using insights from the typology, presents implications for policy and practice and provides avenues for future research. The dissertation can be downloaded using the following link: http://repository.tue.nl/837587
A few weeks before the publication of psychiatric manual DSM-5, in April 2013, Director of the NIMH Thomas Insel wrote in his blog that the patients suffering from mental disorders deserve better than a manual which validity is inadequate because not solidly founded on genetics and neuroscience. Widely publicized on the web, Insel's post advocated a new method introduced in 2009: « NIMH has launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system ». RDoC aims at accelerating the translation of knowledge from basic research to clinical practice. Translational psychiatric neuroscience is at the heart of European and US research policies and deserve close attention from a social studies of science and medicine perspective because, I will argue in this paper, it is part of the new sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009) of contemporary mental health systems. In this paper, I will study the needs, promises and critiques that translational neuroscientists face when dealing with mental disorders as an object of study. Drawing on expert interviews of clinicians-researchers and on a review of the literature on RDoC, I will explore the narratives of the future, and how the translation gap or lag appears in these narratives, together with its solutions (transforming diagnosis, better interdisciplinarity, knowledge brokering…). This paper proposes a sociology of translational psychiatric neuroscience which maps the envisioned futures incorporated in today brain science.
Abstract In postcolonial territories such as the peripheries of Mexican metropolis, urban designs are subject to endless processes of informal material and immaterial changes produced by complex networks of local socio-cultural performativities. From the scope of the Modern, euro-centric urban theories and design practices, these subaltern territories have long been considered impure, irrelevant for the production of architectural knowledge and subjects to be disciplined when not neglected. The efforts of canonical urban design to bring these auto-constructed informal territories into a presumably universal order have constantly failed. Contesting spatialities emerge from the cracks of formal design. Our research explores the subaltern urbanity and its production of spatial knowledge in Xonaca, Puebla, Mexico; an old “barrio” where popular culture and everyday performativities construct material and immaterial realities that cannot longer be overlooked by formal urban planning. Informed by postcolonial perspectives on cultural mobility and studies on subaltern epistemic practices, this work proposes to reconsider the phenomenological understanding of territories not as undefined human experiences in places or private affective relations to space, but as the production of urban meaning through the cultural and communal body and its senses. One of our goals is to investigate alternative approaches to urban design that sensibly engage with local realities. Mexican cities and their peripheral settlements require architectural strategies that respond to their dynamics of social and material displacement. We propose looking into informal urban worlds like that of Xonaca as potential sources of knowledge for the creation of socially, culturally and technologically sustainable urban solutions. Key words: urban design, performativity, subaltern knowledge, postcoloniality, phenomenology.
This paper focuses on the increasing prevalence of devices for self-evaluation in the context of social media, that is tools that allow users to make sense of the activities and data they produce in social media platforms. While platforms focus on creating climates of immediacy and now-ness, they offer little access the past, to retrospectively search and make sense of one’s data. This lack has lead to the emergence of numerous self-evaluation tools, offering a re-organisation of data, activities and temporalities. The primary focus lies on the performative capacities of such tools, as suggested in the work of Power, Strathern and Espeland, showing that the measurements they create are not designed to capture a separate reality, but function as framing devices, inviting some types of awareness, and action while ruling out others. The framing dynamics are explored by focusing on the production of numbers as enumerated entities (Verran 2010), drawing attention to how numbers are never simply abstractions, but construct relations and temporalities, most particularly through algorithmic rankings and dynamics of ordinality. The role of numbers is understood in relation to dynamics of mediation and medium-specificity (Rogers 2009). Self-evaluative tools not only draw on data and activities specific to social media platforms, they also allow for new modes of organising these activities, data and temporalities. The interlinked movement of numbers, media and selves in self-evaluation is explored as dynamic assemblage, opening up engagement with selected intervals of the past, in order to create climates of anticipation and future orientation.
2013 •
2019 •
Energy Research and Social Science (ERSS)
Beyond technical smartness: rethinking the development and implementation of sociotechnical smart grids in India2019 •
2013 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)
Smart hybrid power system for base transceiver stations with real-time energy management2013 •
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
R&D and Implementation Outcomes from the US-India Center For Building Energy Research and Development (CBERD)2019 •
The 7th STS Italia Conference “Technoscience from Below”
Informal Progressive Collaboration with Bureaucratic Public Bodies and Power Asymmetry: A Case of Public Procurement for Innovation (PPI)2018 •
Università degli studi di Padova, STS Italia, Pantheon Sorbonnne
Image of the other - online ghettos as an inspiration to religious extremism2018 •
Political Ecologies of the Far Right
Medieval Political Ecologies and Eco-Nationalists: What If Nature Is Cultural?
Suyash Jolly