Science and Its Publics Actors and Discourses of Vaccination Governance in India

Abstract

This thesis investigates the discursive negotiation and contestation of science in India, specifically focussing on how public understanding of vaccines and vaccination is shaped, refracted, and reconstituted over time. It foregrounds the role of discourse in mediating the relationship between the state, the scientific community, and the public. newlineA key concern of the thesis is to trace how discourses around the efficacy, safety, and legitimacy of vaccines are generated and evolve across time. In doing this, it reveals how these discourses are not merely objective scientific debates, but instead are contestation sites where broader struggles over authority, trust, and accountability play out. The public understanding of vaccines and vaccination is not understood here as a static set of beliefs or deficits in knowledge. Rather, it is conceptualised as an emergent, historically embedded, and politically mediated outcome of interactions between three key actors: the state, the scientific community, and the public. newlineThe discursive shifts probed in this study explicate how publics are not passive recipients of scientific communication, but active agents who interpret, challenge, and reshape scientific narratives based on historical memories, social experiences, and political subjectivities. newlineThe thesis uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to offer a methodological framework that allows for a dialogical and interdiscursive reading of different forms of texts. Using the frameworks developed by Norman Fairclough, Teun van Dijk, and Ruth Wodak, it identifies how discourse produces and reproduces power relations and how certain claims to knowledge gain legitimacy while others are delegitimised. It also showcases that while elite actors strategically frame their narratives to maintain epistemic authority, but by ways of interactions with the publics end up reconfiguring it. newlineCOVID-19 is considered to be a critical site of rupture for this thesis. It brought to the fore long-standing frictions in the state-science.