From Circumspect Technocrat to Committed Radical: Ward Morhouse on Administering Knowledge for Development

Speaker:  Jahnavi Phalkey is the Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. She is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and has co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. She also produced and directed the documentary film Cyclotron.

Moderator: Victor Seow, Harvard University 

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A prominent political activist, educationist, and publisher in the United States, Ward Morehouse was the founder of the Council on International and Public Affairs (CIPA) and co-founder, with Richard Grossman, of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). Morehouse and Grossman were some of the first activists to denounce the concept of “corporate personhood” in their Rethinking Democracy Workshops. In India, Morehouse is best known and remembered most for his association with the legal battle following a gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal (1984). Morehouse provided an assessment of key decisions on institution building, science policy, science education and the role of science in India’s development that were taken in the first twenty years after India's independence. He showed us the institutional landscape of science through an iterative dialogue with scientists and high-ranking science administrators. Morehouse’s work is as a witness of its time, as a source to better understand the conversations behind the faith in science and technology for development in India.