The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) hosted a seminar on Moral Vaccination: Ideas and Institutions in the Control of Contagion in China and India on Tuesday, December 10, 2024.

The seminar featured a conversation between Prerna Singh, Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor in Political Science, Watson Institute and Priyadarshini Singh, Fellow, CSEP.

About the event

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic was a stark reminder that the greatest threats to the human species have come from the tiniest of creatures, disease-causing microorganisms. Specially since settled agriculture and the domestication of animals, microscopic pathogens have been a singular cause of human mortality, claiming more lives than wars, natural disasters and non-infectious diseases combined. Even as we today have access to unprecedentedly sophisticated knowledge, and technologies to identify, prevent and treat, infectious diseases remain a salient and growing socio-economic, political, and bio-security risk. Epidemiologists warn that climate and demographic change are intensifying our vulnerability to new and existing pathogens. How do we control this real and growing risk of infectious disease?

I explore this timely question through a historical lens, focusing on the differential control of the oldest and deadliest viral malaise, smallpox through the spread of the world’s first, quintessential and most successful vaccine, variola vaccine in China and India. I structure paired case comparisons at a subnational and national unit of analysis across the temporal landscape demarcated by the discovery of the vaccine in 1798 and the eradication of smallpox in 1975 – the cities of Canton and Calcutta in imperial China and colonial India (1804-1900), and the newly sovereign states of China and India (1950-75). My multi-sited archival research across these case comparisons rejects hegemonic rational actor models that explain state commitment, frontline institutions’ implementation, and popular cooperation in terms of strategic interest maximizing decisions. Instead, it brings out the importance of a moral relationship between states and societies.

Speakers 

Prerna Singh

Prerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor in Political Science at the Watson Institute with appointments in the School of Public Health and the Department of Sociology. She has published award-winning books and articles on human development, social welfare, public health, and ethnicity and nationalism. Her first book, How Solidarity Works for Welfare was awarded best book prizes from both the American Political Science and the American Sociological Associations. Singh has been awarded fellowships by the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Social Science Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the American Academy of Berlin, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Harvard Academy and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She has shared her research with scholarly, policy and popular audiences in over a hundred lectures, including keynote addresses, delivered across twenty different countries. Singh has served on the academic advisory board of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the steering committee of the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown, is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and co-convenes the Brown-Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar in South Asian Politics. She serves on the editorial boards of Cambridge University Press’s Studies in Comparative Politics and Elements in the Politics of Development series. From 2021-23, Singh was President of the Comparative Politics section, the largest section of the American Political Science Association.

Priyadarshini Singh

Priyadarshini Singh is a Fellow with the Human Development research program at CSEP. She has previously worked with the Centre for Policy Research-New Delhi, Ashoka University and PwC-India. She completed a PhD at the Department of Politics and International Relations at SOAS, University of London as a Felix Scholar. Her research work focuses on political economy of policy-making with a focus on education, history of public institutions and grassroots political ideas and politics. Her recent publication is ‘Ideas, Policies and Practices: Tracing the evolution of elementary education reform from 1975’ (2023 PE05- RISE program at University of Pennsylvania).

Priyadarshini is a member of the Karnataka State Education Policy Commission (2024 onwards).

Please contact Gurmeet Kaur at GKaur@csep.org for general queries and Ayesha Manocha at AManocha@csep.org for media queries.