National Institute of Science Education and Research - Bhubaneswar (NISER)

Overview

A primary objective of the Institute is to train and nurture human resources in the Sciences for the knowledge economies of the future. This is in line with a general shift in geo-political thinking that requires a remedy for sites of knowledge production centred in the west. Such a strategic shift in perspective has been necessitated by the realization that the unique circumstances of our nation demand unique scientific and pedagogic responses. Consequently, we are called upon to question and account for conventional narratives that stake claims to categorizations of science, technology, environment, learning, innovation, design and being. The predominant discourse that seeks to structure these superficially hard categories is predicated on justifications that till date have not moved beyond regimes of hierarchy, control and access. These strictures are an inherent feature of “Institutionalized Science” where Newtonian principles of organizing domains of cognition and mechanisms of representation constrain debates on what new conceptualizations of science ought to be like. More problematically this stifles the potential for interdisciplinarity just when everybody talks its language. This means we continue to think in and with strait jacketed binaries such as natural / artificial or being /thing and perhaps most dangerously science / everything else. The founding of this Institute is rooted in the understanding that the contexts we inhabit are dynamic and in flux, while we have not begun to think in terms of solutions to most of these problems we realize that they exist and that we need to quickly participate in the process of finding out some answers.