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Please join us for the next talk in the Sociology-Anthropology Colloquium Series.

Speaker: Dr. Renny Thomas, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. 

Time and Location: March 11, Wednesday. 1.30 PM. AC-04-LR-304

Click here for the Zoom link for Hybrid Participation.

Title: The Case of Minor Laboratories.

Abstract: Based on my ongoing fieldwork in Unani clinics and my previous experience of being part of scientific laboratories, the talk will discuss the site of ‘laboratory’ in sociology/anthropology of science. Anthropological scholarship has radically opened up new ways of understanding the site of ‘laboratory’. Laboratory ethnography by now is a well established tradition of studying the cultures of sciences in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and such ethnographic works reveal that scientific knowledge production doesn't happen in isolation. Yet when we think of labs, we think of major labs, and we think of them as places of science, and places without culture. In this talk, I will discuss the case of  minor laboratories as places with culture and science. By looking at minor laboratories, the talk aims to conceptually think about the possibility of going beyond major laboratories as ethnographic sites to study the cultures of sciences and medicine.

Bio: Renny Thomas is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. He was the Taki Visiting Global Professor at New York University, New York (2024-2025) and  has been a Visiting  Fellow at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Cultural History at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany ( 2022-2023), and the Charles Wallace Fellow in Social Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK (2017-2018). His research interests and published works are  broadly in the fields of  Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology of Religion. He has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in scientific laboratories and currently doing fieldwork in a Unani clinic exploring how science-medicine-society interacts, negotiates and co-produce ‘modern institutions’ and ‘disciplines’. He is the author of Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations (Routledge, 2022) and Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes (Tulika Books/Columbia University Press, 2025). He is currently an associate editor of the journal, Social Studies of Science (SAGE) and book review co-editor of  Contributions to Indian Sociology (SAGE).