Shiju Sam Varughese’s Contested Knowledge: Science, Media, and Democracy in Kerala is a fresh and timely attempt at thinking about the structuring of the discourse of science in a non-Western context. The book—through an analysis of newspaper reportage of a set of controversies regarding science and technology in Kerala in the late 1990s and 2000s—demonstrates how a perception of risk has been central to an expansive imagination of the scientific enterprise, allowing for the emergence of hitherto excluded actors. Apart from lucid discussions of the scholarship in the fields of science studies, sociology of science, media studies and theories of public sphere, the book also manages to assemble together a unique archive of print materials, culled from Malayalam newspapers.

Linking Science and Media