This project investigates media's role in technoscience controversies by focusing on four case studies from India: issues of chronic toxicity in the continuing aftermath of the Bhopal gas disaster; disputes over regulating emission of potentially carcinogenic electromagnetic radiation by mobile towers; battles over building atomic power plants between nuclear nationalists on one hand and anti-nuclear pacifists and affected local communities on the other; public deliberations leading to a moratorium on genetically modified eggplants. I do not suggest that each technology determines its own particular discourse. Rather, I focus on how science as culture interacts with media discourses and cultural values: newsworthiness, nationalism, security, framing, globalization, and democracy. The debates I explore are not restricted to "objective" scientific processes, but are instead marked by incommensurable values, competing expertise, and radical uncertainties. These controversies spiral out in the public domain, where the expressive and persuasive characteristics of media prove crucial.

A technoscience public consisting of--scientists, activists, policy-makers, and affected patients--that gathers around a disruptive technology, such as a nuclear reactor or cell tower antennae, cannot be materialized or imagined without the circulation of discourses through the process of mediation. Thus, technoscience publics and media publics intersect and reconfigure each other, and in each chapter, I trace the different unfolding debates by tracking the dynamic reconfigurations of the "mediated technoscience publics." Through an elaboration of the concept "mediated technoscience publics" my dissertation provides both a theoretical vocabulary and a methodological approach to study media and technoscience/environmental debates together. I emerge with notions of media that at once retain the specificity of a particular media format like a talk show or a media object like a cell phone, and yet are not tied to any one of them. I conceptualize media landscapes as circulatory systems of signs and signals, discourses and matter, representations and resonances. My approach emphasizes close examination of media practices (Ursula Rao, Brian Larkin) and performative mediation (Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska) to theorize the materiality of scientific knowledge production and publics (Karen Barad, Alexander Kluge, Jane Bennett).