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Short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper analyzes the cultural politics of Indian climate modeling and unpacks the entanglements between technoscience, affect and national identity in the Global South.

Long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper analyzes the cultural politics of Indian climate modeling and the complex and emotional responses that my interview questions often provoked. In making sense of my research data, I am guided by the following questions: How and why do the technopolitics of climate modeling induce such intense emotional reactions? And, on a more general note, how is the affectual relationship between particular technologies and articulations of national interest and national identity constituted? I argue that there are two kinds of memories and experiences that have to be taken into account when trying to answer these questions and, by extension, to understand climate modeling in India. On the one hand, these are memories about Indian self-reliant development of particular technologies such as the nuclear program and supercomputing. This is India’s technopolitical history that frames the life and work of Indian climate modelers. On the other hand, there are more recent memories and experiences made by climate modelers in an uneven global epistemic economy that tell us something particular about Indian climate modeling which is not reducible to local history. Unpacking these complexities, I suggest, enables us to fathom the emotional dimensions of climate modeling in the Global South and to tackle the entanglements between technoscience, affect and national identity.