A Lesson from IIT | ‘Why Humanities and Social Sciences are gaining popularity at IITs’

Tambiah offers his sweeping account as a corrective to the often-held intellectualist image of science as part of which science is reduced to a set of ideas and statements, largely divorced from its context of production and any form of internal sociality it might have on account of being a practice requiring intense cooperation as well as competition, not to say handling sophisticated as well as emerging forms of knowledge and technology.

Perhaps such an account and similar others offered by scholars studying science from humanities and social science perspectives enables us to understand why there has been a surge of humanities courses in IITs.

A new generation of scholars and students do not take the normativity of the so-called ‘hard sciences’ as a given, as against which all other disciplines have to be ranked and measured. Increasing sensitivity towards methods and ways of looking which encourage a reflexive and critical attitude to knowledge has meant that the technocratic form of heliocentricity with the sciences at the centre has been displaced and for the better.

It is important to add here that the sciences too have benefitted from this trend which has been consistently gaining in strength since the past several years.

Following a practice which has become a norm across global institutes of higher learning, the IITs too have understood that pedagogy narrowly focused on just science and technology fails to impart to young learners the essential and now widely recognised wisdom that society and technology mutually constitute each other. Technology is neither devised in a vacuum nor used as a value-neutral tool to transform society; rather it responds to and is put together by multiple strands and networks within which it is hard, and in fact futile to decide, where science ends and society begins and vice-versa.

The increasing realisation that perspectival plurality inherent in a technology makes it more efficient and pliable, has led to the necessity of taking into account different viewpoints at the stage of fabrication itself.

The students exposed to courses in the humanities and the social sciences ask new and imaginative questions, for example, related to economy, ethics and even aesthetics to not only gain a greater understanding of the process of their work, but also bring to bear upon their process questions related to social justice and accessibility which were earlier considered peripheral and were neglected in a purely instrumental understanding of technology.

It is not as if students already understand different disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences as they enter the IITs. Rather, for many students taking courses in these disciplines feels like a gush of fresh air, which is not in the least due to their under-exposure to such modes of thought in their prior training. Many students find courses in history, literature, economics and other disciplines good to think with and in fact liberating because of the sheer engagement they allow with not only discipline-specific theories and ideas, but also with the world they see every day around them. Their exposure to modes of training where arguments by learners and their self-reflections and grappling with contentious and vexed social problems are very much a part of the pedagogic process, gives them the vocabulary and confidence to mature into informed-critical citizens. As word of mouth goes around, the technology students not only enrol for basic courses, but also for those pertaining to highly advanced topics in the humanities and the social sciences.

The more these courses have been able to embed themselves in the IIT milieu, the more the demand has grown for them, often pushing the instructors to devise new and imaginative syllabi to address the great need for the sobering interpretative frameworks offered by the humanities and the social sciences.

Another reason for the popularity of these courses is that they allow students at the IITs to be able to talk about their social location in informed and reflexive terms and thus also to make good academic sense of social diversity and difference. With students from different social backgrounds entering these institutions it can’t be emphasised enough how deeply important this aspect is and how it fulfils the need for a truly well-rounded and progressive education.

Perhaps, it is also important to point out why these courses at IITs differ from similar courses offered elsewhere. Without belabouring this point much, it can be said that due to the structure of IITs these courses run against a backdrop of already in-place interdisciplinarity. There is always a possibility in such an environment that true and meaningful interdisciplinarity can be fostered, which is not simply juxtaposition or intermixing of disciplines. Further, it is a misconception to think that these courses are only meant for postgraduate students or for research scholars in the humanities and the social sciences.

The bread and butter of teaching at the IITs is about catering to the undergraduates and apart from a few specialised courses most of these courses are open for undergraduates, for which they enrol in large numbers, initially out of curiosity and to fulfil curriculum related requirements, and increasingly as they progress further in their studies, to learn and even advance their interests in these disciplines. The fact that young undergraduates are amongst the major takers of these courses also pushes the course instructors to think about structure and delivery in novel ways, further underscoring the point about interdisciplinarity mentioned above.

Lastly, it must be emphasised that it is wrong to regard the presence of humanities and the social sciences in a tokenistic manner, as subjects of secondary importance. These disciplines fulfil the all-important role of creating a critical discourse in the IITs, making genuine interventions on questions of pedagogy, policy and within the overall environs of teaching and learning. As the French philosopher and sociologist of science, Bruno Latour reminded us again and again over his illustrious career that to democratise the sciences it is important to recognise the different stakeholders, including non-humans and objects, in the process of knowledge-making, the humanities and the social sciences at the IITs not only serve to underline this insight, but also participate equally in the diversification of epistemologies and in alerting the broader IIT and academic community that pure scientism or solutionism ends up creating more problems than solving any of them.

These disciplines nudge us to see that problems confronting the contemporary world are too complex to be understood, let alone solved, from any single disciplinary perspective, and in the process also tell us that the so-called problems can be posed in different and more nuanced ways. All this and more added to the fact that they certainly enhance the joy of being and learning at an IIT campus, not in the least by making it more inclusive and dialogic.

(The writer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Mandi)

(A Lesson from IIT is a weekly column by an IIT faculty member on learning, science and technology on campus and beyond. The column appears every Friday)