Amit Prasad

Amit Prasad specializes in global, transnational, and post/de-colonial sociology of science, technology, and medicine. His research focuses on the complex, contested, and yet, often, hidden role of transnational/global flows of knowledge, technological artifacts, and people in constituting subjects, in imagining geographies, and in laboratory practices. His first book, Imperial Technoscience: Entangled Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), through an excavation of connected histories of MRI yokes together two important sociological concerns, namely empirical investigation of local cultures of sciences and their hierarchical entanglements within national and transnational political economy and within Euro/West-centric discourses. Prasad has also published on the shift in visual culture of medicine with the emergence of technologies such as MRI and on transnational hierarchies in overseas drug trials and medical transcription. For the last two years he has been studying COVID misinformation, in particular how its interpretations and travel within and across social groups provides a window to the history of the present. His research has been funded by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies/National Endowment for Humanities, among others. His second book, Science Studies Meets Colonialism (Polity, 2022) investigates how colonial tropes, norms, ideologies, etc. continue to animate the present, including in the fields of history of science and science and technology studies (STS). Drawing on an ethnographic study of a stem cell clinic, he is writing his third book that is tentatively titled Globalization in a Laboratory: Stem Cells, Scientific Uncertainty, and Journeys of Hope. 

He is an editor of the journal Science, Technology and Society (Sage).

He is also an avid collector of Indian art, medieval miniatures and modern and contemporary paintings and etchings.

Anti-Science Misinformation and Conspiracies during COVID-19 Pandemic (open access): 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09717218211003413