Dhruv Raina
“Other Knowledge Systems”
The Challenges for the University
As has been evident for some time now, the specter of decolonization is haunting universities, though what it is means different things in different regions and national contexts. Decolonization presents itself as a homogenous emancipatory movement that seeks to redefine and restructure the world and ways of knowing. But in its struggle for epistemic and cognitive justice, it has mostly failed to situate itself or provide nuance. This paper attempts to evince, through the lens of the philosophy of sciences, the different meanings of cognitive justice. This is important, for the university and the worlds of the sciences and social sciences face major threats today. The neoliberal restructuring of the university privileges government-mandated and industrially relevant research. In fact, these developments have proved particularly ominous for the social sciences. Further, climate denial and the anti-vaxxer campaigns, orchestrated through the balkanized social media, have played a significant role in challenging the epistemic authority of academically produced knowledge. At the same time, indigenist and populist trends in several regions of the world have attempted to trivialize or hijack decolonization.
Dhruv Raina was Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he taught the history and philosophy of science. He studied physics at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Göteborg University. He was active in the People’s Science Movement. He was a scientist at the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies. He has written and researched on the history of science in India, notably with S Irfan Habib, with whom he co-authored several papers and books. His most recent work addresses the circulation of concepts in the social sciences, and the emergence of inter- and transdisciplinary fields of research. This concern with interdisciplinary fields has resulted in a collaboration with mathematicians and physicists working on fields that transgress the boundaries of the natural and social sciences. He has been Visiting Professor of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris; Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin; holder of the Heinrich Zimmer Chair in Intellectual History and Indian Philosophy, Heidelberg University; and Visiting Fellow at ETH, Zurich, and at Cambridge University. He was elected Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2018, was appointed Visiting D.D. Kosambi Professor at Goa University in 2017, and was Visiting Professor at the University of Bayreuth’s Excellence Cluster Africa–Europe from 2022 to 2023. He is now Adjunct Professor at the Indian Institute for Science Education and Research, Pune.