The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr Jahnavi Phalkey, historian of science and technology, filmmaker, and Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. Phalkey is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India, and producer-director of the documentary film Cyclotron (2020) – a film about the world's oldest functional particle accelerator and the people who keep it running today. Her writing spans the history of science, technology, and the state in twentieth-century India.
The conversation traces Phalkey's route into the history of science by way of political sociology, silent cinema, and a chance funded place at Georgia Tech under John Krige, and her eventual return to studying India after finding its absence conspicuous in accounts of twentieth-century science. She discusses how Atomic State pushes back against two dominant framings in the historiography of science in India: the "tools of empire" argument for the imperial period, and the scarcity of histories of Indian science after independence. Drawing on the early efforts to build particle accelerators in Kolkata and Bangalore, and the eventual rise of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Department of Atomic Energy, she describes how the demands of a single, resource-intensive field reshaped the relationship between Indian science and the Indian state — and how that "big science" model went on to marginalise both university research and smaller-scale inquiry.
The discussion broadens into Phalkey's work reframing India and China as "conceptual sites" rather than deviant "cases" measured against a European norm, and closes with her current thinking on critique in the history and philosophy of science, informed in part by Bruno Latour, and on what it means for historians of science to help the public make meaning of research in an age of climate change, AI, and new gene technologies.
In this episode, Phalkey:
Describes her winding path into history of science
Explains what drew her back to studying science in India specifically, after finding it missing from standard histories of twentieth-century science
Outlines the two historiographical tendencies Atomic State argues against: the "tools of empire" framework and the neglect of post-independence science
Discusses the concept of India and China as "conceptual sites," against the limits of a Europe-benchmarked history of science
Traces the early, fragile efforts to build particle accelerators in Kolkata and Bangalore, and the wartime origins of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Reflects on how the everyday bureaucracy of running a national laboratory shaped the entangled relationship between Indian science and the postcolonial state
Discusses her documentary Cyclotron and the material, practical difficulties of building and maintaining a particle accelerator in a resource-constrained setting
Considers how the "big science" model, centred on the Department of Atomic Energy, drew resources and people away from Indian universities and small-scale research
Calls for a connected rather than a difference-based history of science in the Global South, and reflects on reconstituting the meaning of critique in history and philosophy of science
Relevant Links
Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India — Permanent Black
Cyclotron (2020) — documentary directed and produced by Jahnavi Phalkey
Science Gallery Bengaluru
Science of Giants
Devi Prize – for promoting "public engagement with science" (2024)
Infosys Prize, Humanities ( 2023)
Mentioned scholarship
David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge History of India)
Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" (2004)
Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985)
Note: This conversation was recorded in May, 2026
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024) –  winner of the 2025 Lakatos Award and the 2024 Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy from the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
The conversation centres on the central argument of the book: that the leading ideas which have shaped neuroscience are best understood as attempts to simplify the brain, one of the more complex objects of scientific inquiry. Mazviita describes this in practice as a mismatch between the brain's overwhelming complexity and the representations — models, theories, diagrams — that scientists rely on, which necessarily ignore much of that complexity. She identifies three recurring simplifying strategies running through the book — reduction, mathematisation, and analogy — and discusses how "proxy systems," from anesthetised cats to cerebral organoids, let scientists study minimal, decontextualised versions of the brain built using these strategies.
She also discusses the diverging paths of neuroscience and AI research, the risk of conflating predictive power with genuine understanding, and why she advocates for greater theoretical pluralism in how science approaches the brain.
In this episode, Chirimuuta:
Describes her academic path from psychophysics and vision science back into philosophy of science
Introduces The Brain Abstracted and its central concern with simplification in neuroscience
Unpacks three recurring simplification strategies in neuroscience — reduction, mathematisation, and analogy
Traces how the computer analogy shaped artificial neural networks, from McCulloch and Pitts through Hubel and Wiesel to today's deep learning models
Introduces the idea of the "Heraclitean brain" — a system always in flux — and what this means for scientific explanation
Reflects on the historical back-and-forth between localisationist and dynamic/distributed views of brain function
Considers the shifting, increasingly divergent relationship between neuroscience and AI research, including energy efficiency as a new point of biological inspiration
Calls for greater theoretical humility and pluralism in neuroscience, drawing on the 19th-century work of John Hughlings Jackson as a case study
Relevant Links
The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press)
Mazviita Chirimuuta wins the 2025 Lakatos Award — LSE
Mazviita Chirimuuta's research site / Outside Colour
Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2017)
Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World (1999)
Nicole Rust, Elusive Cures (2025)
Note: This conversation was recorded at the end of 2025.
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr. Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-Chief of Nature. Skipper has held the role since 2018, and has a background in the genetic sciences. She is also notably the first female — and only the eighth person — to lead the journal since its founding in 1869.
Skipper reflects on what she has worked to preserve and change since taking on the role, from deepening the connection between Nature's research and journalism teams to broadening the journal's scope beyond the natural sciences into engineering, social sciences, and clinical research. Drawing on her training as a geneticist, she discusses how evidence and rigor take different forms across disciplines, and why she sees no single "final word" in science.
The conversation turns to some of the defining pressures on contemporary research culture: the COVID-19 pandemic's paradoxical effect on public trust in science, the discipline-specific nature of the replication crisis, and the rise of meta-science as a lens for understanding how research itself is produced. Skipper also discusses Nature's move toward transparent peer review, the persistent inequities shaping who gets published, and why she remains fundamentally hopeful about science's capacity for self-correction.
In this episode, Skipper:
Describes what she set out to preserve and change on becoming Nature's Editor-in-Chief, including expanding the journal's scope into engineering, social sciences, and clinical research
Reflects on how her background in genetics shaped her thinking about evidence, rigor, and multiple valid paths to a scientific claim
Discusses the COVID-19 pandemic's dual legacy: accelerating the adoption of preprints while eroding public trust in science
Unpacks the replication crisis as a discipline-specific phenomenon and what Nature has learned from it
Explains the growing role of meta-science, particularly at the intersection of psychology, human behaviour, and research practice
Details Nature's move to transparent and, since June 2025, mandatory published peer review reports
Addresses persistent inequities in scientific publishing and Nature's editorial efforts to counter "helicopter science"
Shares why she remains hopeful about science's capacity for self-correction and its role in building a more equitable world
Relevant Links
Nature Journal
Nature Profile
Begley & Ellis (2012), "Raise standards for preclinical cancer research" — Nature comment on reproducibility in cancer research
Nature: Registered Reports format
Nature : Transparent Peer Review initiative
Note: This conversation was recorded in October 2025.
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Steven Shapin, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard. Shapin reflects on his path into the history and sociology of science and discusses the central concerns of his work: how knowledge is produced, the social foundations of trust in science, the embodied nature of knowledge, and the performance of expertise. 
He revisits Leviathan and the Air-Pump, co-authored with Simon Schaffer, outlining the Boyle–Hobbes controversy and showing how seventeenth-century scientific credibility depended on rhetoric, social standing, and performance, while highlighting the broader relevance of the book’s insights into the social foundations of knowledge. Shapin considers contemporary challenges, including political interventions in science and universities, the effects of digital communication, and the fragmentation of expertise, and reframes the “crisis of truth” as a crisis of social knowledge.
Finally, he connects these themes to his recent work on taste and eating (Eating and Being), examining how communities form shared judgments about food and flavour, paralleling the intersubjective construction of objectivity in science.
In this episode:
Recounts his path through Edinburgh, UCSD, and Harvard and what each taught about interdisciplinarity.
Explains the story and broader thesis of Leviathan and the Air-Pump: facts are made credible through practice, rhetoric, and social arrangements.
Reflects on shifting disciplinary fault lines.
Describes how credibility is performed today and the growing value of face-to-face embodiment.
Surveys credibility issues from science’s entanglement with business, government, and partisan politics.
Discusses Eating and Being, drawing parallels between intersubjective agreement in science and taste.
Transcript being prepared.
Photo: Steven Shapin, Groningen, Netherlands, March 2020, by Newfrogm, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Relevant links
Steven Shapin — Harvard profile / home page
LARB Essay “Is There a Crisis of Truth?” (2019)
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985) – Wikipedia entry
Steven Shapin's books
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Professor Cordelia Fine — psychologist, award-winning writer, and professor in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. Cordelia is one of today’s leading voices on how science and society shape our understandings of gender.
In the conversation, Cordelia discusses her new book Patriarchy, Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality – and Why Men Still Win at Work. The book challenges two influential views of gender inequality: the “different but equal” view, or the claim that natural differences between the sexes explain persistent inequalities in work and care; and the “business case” for diversity, which treats equality as worthwhile only when it improves efficiency or profit.
Fine argues that both perspectives misrepresent the problem. Drawing on psychology, sociology, economics, and cultural evolution, she shows how divisions of labour are created and reinforced, how expectations are instilled from childhood, and how workplace structures designed around constant availability clash with the realities of people’s lives.
She concludes by outlining a new vision of gender equality — one that rejects both biological determinism and narrow economic utility, and instead centres justice, fairness, and human wellbeing.
In this episode, Fine:
Explains why the “different but equal” and “business case” narratives remain persuasive yet inadequate
Traces how gender divisions of labour operate at individual, interactional, and institutional levels
Describes how children actively take up and reproduce gender norms
Shows how workplace ideals disadvantage carers and perpetuate inequality
Proposes a conception of gender justice that measures equality in terms of wellbeing, respect, and fair reward
Relevant Links
Cordelia's Website
University of Melbourne profile
Patriarchy, Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality – and Why Men Still Win at Work
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (W.W. Norton, 2010)
Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Sex (W.W. Norton, 2017)
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org