EQUINOX 2023

For Tolstoy, the pursuit of science/knowledge was meaningless unless it provides an answer to the question “What shall we do and how shall we live?” Echoing the same, Durkheim asks “What good is it to strive after a knowledge of reality if the knowledge we acquire cannot serve us in our lives?” (1958). Research is a pursuit of knowledge, a search for answers to questions that can initiate radical processes of social transformation. The greatest challenge and also opportunity for researchers and scientists is to negotiate their concerns, expertise, and passion with their social reality by rethinking theory and its application and relevance.

The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, associated with Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, and many others, and the Enlightenment of the late 17th to late 18th centuries, especially the French Enlightenment, in the 18th century associated with Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and others are landmarks and turning points in the history of mankind. The former marked the rise of modern science, and the development of the empirical method, and the latter, underlined the power of reason, as opposed to religion and superstition, the pursuit of science, and the scientific method, not only to understand the world but also as a basis of social progress and change. Dictatorial power, superstition, and injustice were fought with weapons of argument and wit grounded in ideas. Later, the search for the solution to the problem of order in 19th-century Europe (in the aftermath of the Industrial and the French Revolutions), gave rise to methodologies and perspectives not only to understand the world but also to transform it. All these movements are examples of the pursuit of knowledge that has led to social transformations.

This year, in Equinox 2023 we showcase the dynamics between theory, research, and social transformation: how research in various areas has been useful for the public good; ideas and their impact on contemporary research in any discipline or in any area of life-- in health, agriculture, transport, communications, nation building, art, literature, social movements and so on.

Some suggested themes (but not limited to) are as follows:

• Laboratory to Land approach

• Art and Social Reform

• Impact of feminist studies

• Critical Theory

• Application of the concept of infinity, zero, etc.

• Application and impact of quantum theory, string theory

• Scientific breakthroughs

• Wildlife and Biodiversity Conservation

• Artificial Intelligence

• Application of nanotechnology

• Breakthroughs in conventional and complementary medicines

• Advanced and alternative pedagogy

• Biographies: Philosophers, thinkers, scientists, and writers as agents of change (Ramanujan, Marx, Buddha, Mari Curie, Manto to mention a few.)