Opinion Why IIT engineering students need social science training

           Reading books and scriptures, countless people died, none became any wiser/Reading (understanding) a two-and-a-half-lettered word ‘prem’        (love) makes one wise/

            Kabir Das 

“Why should we engineers learn about mental health and society?”, a fourth-year computer science student asked me during a class on mental health and society in the Global South. A second-year data science student pondered over the mind-brain relationship discussed in class, “Why do we need the concept of mind?” He asserted the need to do away with the concept of mind and focus on the brain which can be objectively analysed using sophisticated imaging technologies.

As a faculty member in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) tasked with teaching STEM students, I encounter such interesting and thought-provoking questions that open up inter- and multidisciplinary conversations. The notion that humanities and social sciences, and STEM subjects are compartmentalised entities is almost always reinforced at our schools and higher educational institutions. Even within social sciences and humanities, we hardly have dialogue crisscrossing disciplinary boundaries in India. Psychology, for example, in its quest to be an objective and value-neutral science, hesitates to shake hands with sociologists, philosophers, or anthropologists to understand how the mind is extended and embedded within a complex web of interconnections. Unlike universities, the HSS department at IITs houses diverse disciplines like Cultural Studies, Economics, Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology under one umbrella, which helps us to know each other better and flatten the established hierarchies of disciplinary knowledge.

HSS courses offered to STEM students also provide avenues to think through connections between HSS and science and technology. Science laboratories and technological advancements cannot be divorced from society as the products of technology ultimately go back to people. An engineer cognisant of poverty in India will rethink the material to be used to make a pacemaker. She will focus on making an instrument that is not only sophisticated but also affordable to the marginalised sections of society. All our academic disciplines are united in the pursuit of a safe and happy world for all despite disciplinary differences. But the challenge is to unearth those latent connections between ethics, values, and technological solutions. After rigorous training in the basic sciences for IIT-JEE and other entrance examinations, most students are tuned to think in categories. HSS courses try to locate concepts on a continuum as our minds and societies are too complex to be compartmentalised. Lives are mostly characterised by in-betweenness, our intimacies are in constant flux, and we may love and hate the same person at the same time.

Understanding and negotiating such ambivalence is part of exploring the complexity both within ourselves and outside as complex social, cultural, and psychological beings. The questions described in the beginning serve as food for thought in bridging the gap between HSS and science and technology. The question on the relevance of mental health for engineers took us to discussions surrounding the co-construction of mental health through social justice and the formation of the mental health industry and the commodification of health as a consequence of corporatisation and globalisation. The discussions on the mind-brain relationship revolved around the ethical problems in reducing the mind-to-brain activity. A person’s distress explained just in terms of a broken brain — Neurophysiological changes in the brain via the fMRI scan — is a valid explanation. The same person understood in terms of struggles and sufferings in life is also an equally valid explanation.

But still, why does popular discourse overemphasise neurochemical imbalance and understate power imbalance when explaining mental distress? Is it a matter of ethics in knowledge production in itself? If we deny the person’s lived experiences and struggles, we reduce them to a bunch of neural substrates, nullifying their personhood. This is akin to erasing someone’s existence. Technology, when applied inappropriately, indiscriminately, and without context could do more harm and amplify suffering as the example above demonstrates.

Technologies that are value-based, locally relevant, ethical, and sensitive to contexts are assets to society. Conversations in HSS classrooms at IITs help students appreciate the multiplicity of perspectives and different ways of being in the world in the hope that we have technologists who are not only logical thinkers but also deeply feeling people responsive to the sufferings of humans and non-humans alike to create a better world for all.

The writer is Assistant Professor, IIT-Palakkad