Monamie Bhadra Haines

Monamie Bhadra Haines is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. Before coming to Virginia Tech, she spent two years as an assistant professor in STS at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen, and three years as an assistant professor in Global STS Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Monamie’s internationally comparative work examines technopolitics, activism and how they might illuminate the workings of nonliberal democracy in the areas of energy transitions and pandemic management in the so-called Global South. She also pursues comparative research on pedagogical practices in European engineering education. The broad intellectual umbrella encompassing these different research interests is interrogating the linkages between the politics of knowledge and power in postcolonial contexts by exploring how nonstate actors (e.g. activists, migrants, social entrepreneurs) engage in technopolitics and collective governance. She is currently completing her book project, Democratic Reactors: Nuclear Power, Dissent, and Experiments with Credibility in India. This monograph traces how elite, urban anti-nuclear activists have tried to build a trans-local anti-nuclear movement, and in doing so, shifted their practice from producing citizen science to citizen audits of nuclear bureaucracy, and from excluding to including lived experiences and self-understandings of nuclear risk. She shows how the shift from scientific to procedural logics offers a way for activists to negotiate two different credibility economies of which they are a part—one with the nuclear state, and another with rural polities whom they seek to represent as Gandhian citizens.