Articles by Veena Das

This paper, in the context of various cholera vaccine trials during the present century, examines critical issues of vaccine research, and demonstrates how the movement from laboratory to field, and then to routine practice involves the complex interaction between science, state and the public sphere. Through narratives of scientists and administrators, the authors try to show the social negotiations through which knowledge either moves from laboratory to the field or is inhibited in this movement. Several questions of scientific management, organisational structures and scientific diplomacy are addressed, in addition to questions about notions of medical efficacy and of risk and its perception by the different social actors.

While in the face of the disorder of collective violence the state seems to absent itself so that we cannot guess how the judicial discourse would have constructed pathological sexuality, we have evidence of how 'individual pathology' is constructed in the rape trial during normal periods. Further, in the dense discursivity of the state as it engages in separating the normal from the pathological, we get a production of bodies (male and female) that normalises sexual violence at least for the purpose of the law.

Sociological Research in India The State of Crisis RESEARCH in any field is sustained over a period of time not by the brilliance of a few outstanding scholars but by the patient building up of competence in the average researcher. What Thomas Kuhn called 'normal science' provides the backbone of research in any subject. While students cannot be trained to do brilliant research they can and must be trained to do competent research. One cannot plan for paradigmatic shifts in a discipline. When these occur they are, by definition, unpredictable. A result of the imaginative flights taken by unfettered minds these paradigmatic shifts are to be celebrated but they cannot be methodically replicated. What is a cause for dismay in the field of sociological research in India is not so much the lack of brilliance as the lack of competence.