Amit Prasad
Associate professor
University of Missouri
USA
Biography
Dr. Amit Prasad is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of South Asian Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Research Interest
His research focuses on transnational features of medical technology innovations and healthcare. In particular, he investigates how technical aspects of innovations are entangled with socio-cultural and economic factors in different nations. His broader goal has been to highlight the role of transnational flows of knowledge, artifacts, and people in medical innovations, which, as he shows in his published work, are often hidden as such because of commonly accepted understanding of the process of invention and national cultures. His book, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), for example, argues that if we move beyond accepted divides such as that between west/non-west, invention/innovation/diffusion, culture/science, etc. a very vibrant, albeit hierarchical, transnational history of medical innovation, development, and diffusion comes to light. He has also published articles on the shift in visual culture of medicine with the emergence of technologies such as MRI. Presently, drawing on an ethnographic study of a stem cell clinic in Delhi, India, interviews of policy makers, analysis of patients’ blogs and videos, and newspaper reports, he is writing a book that is tentatively titled Miracle or Science: Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy Clinic.