Search

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including history of science in East Asia; Korean and Taiwanese academic contexts; and conversations among Asian societies.

In the latest issue's "Editor's Note" of EASTS, Wen-hua Kuo made a call to East Asian science studies scholars to commit to an archeology of the social and technical infrastructure of epidemics. Coincidently, ten historians and sociologists working on science, technology, medicine, and environment with a focus on China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea had just begun a collective effort to understand how face masks had become the most important part of the current pandemic governance in East Asia. As its first step, a virtual workshop, "The Socio-Material History of Masked Societies in East Asia," was held at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science on 26 October 2020. This forum aims to introduce the virtual meeting's outcome to the wider EASTS community and encourages them to engage with the collaborative enterprise to investigate the history of masks. All papers focus on the socio-material dimension of masks while problematizing current culturalist explanatory narratives about "masked societies" in East Asia. By doing so, the papers show how mask use is closely linked to heterogenous but interconnected entanglements of environmental governance, political movements, and risk cultures in East Asian polities. It interrogates these relationships in the context of scientific controversies and quarantine regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which author discusses articles on topics including focuses on "From Postcolonial to Subimperial Formations of Medicine: Superregional Perspectives from Taiwan and Korea" extends the discussion on the formation of colonial knowledge by the Japanese Empire.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on using Asia as a reference point for science, technology and society (STS) studies, another on applying the theory of assemblage in East Asian STS studies and a report on making an STS theory East Asian.

The article discusses developments related to the "East Asian Science, Technology and Society" journal, including its influence on social activities in various East Asian professional societies.

The article shares key insights gleaned from a multiyear collaborative research project on the role of everyday technologies in the making of modern East Asia from the nineteenth century to the present. It explains the three key concepts that have guided the authors' collective research on technological processes andmodernity-- East Asia as a region, infrastructure, and the everyday--illustrating each with specific examples drawn from the domains of food, childbirth, pharmaceuticals, transportation, automation, weather forecasting, and telecommunication. In so doing, the project seeks to introduce two innovations into the study of East Asian science and technology. From a conceptual perspective, the authors' emphasis on infrastructure introduces new lines of inquiry into the various types of networks through which technical changes are conceived, produced, and disseminated. At the same time, the authors' focus on the everyday traces how those technologies have been mixed, modified, and adapted by end users in accordance with culturally specific norms, needs, and aspirations. Moreover, by foregrounding collaborative forms of research, the project advances new methodological strategies into the study of technology and its knowledge, practice, and artifacts that define and redefine East Asia as a region with fluid boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including Taiwan's contemporary techno-controversies; role of STS people to help the antinuclear energy movements; and reflection of STS praxis in East Asia.

Copyright of East Asian Science, Technology & Society is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A review of the article "Where Is East Asia in STS," by John Law and Wen-yuan Lin, is presented.

East Asia and Southeast Asia provide at least four relational locales or sites of cultural critique and materials for new twenty-first-century theory construction governed by growing biological and ecological knowledge. I document a moment in East Asian and Southeast Asian STS that grounds methodological advocacy for how anthropological STS initiatives revise received models and theories and how they work from multiple and differentiated Asian sites, thereby focusing on the importance of Asian examples in global theory without sliding into meaningless discussions of Asian essentialisms or East versusWest orientalisms and occidentalisms. The four relational technoscientific sites and perspectives are those of (a) scientists as social hieroglyphs and peopled networks; (b) hidden curriculums and education reforms; (c) geoportraits of influencing machines, bioecological entanglements, and cultural flows; and (d) disaster and repair cycles, new and old cultural genres for coping, and structures of feelings. By citing the growing new anthropological STS ethnographic work in a variety of Asian locales, I suggest that new narratives and models are already out there as emergent forms of life, that is, as contested, shifting third spaces (forming in the interstices of old distinctions and categories) and ethical plateaus (terrains of decision making where multiple technological changes intersect and impose doublebinds or trade-offs among simultaneous imperatives). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which texts should be canonized, and what mathematical knowledge could be considered "standard," were important issues for practitioners of mathematics in premodern East Asia. The Jiuzhang suanshu had been listed as one of the mathematical canons in Korea since the seventh century before it was lost by the fifteenth century. The canons were replaced by texts from China's Song-Yuan period. Those texts introduced an algebraic method called Tianyuan shu (the "old" method), which was well kept in Korea after its introduction to the peninsula but lost in China from the fifteenth century until its recovery in the eighteenth century. So the Tianyuan shu became a distinctive mark of traditional Korean mathematics. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the imperially composed Shuli jungyun was recognized as the mathematical canon in Qing China and Chosŏn Korea, and the main algebraic method Jiegenfang (the "new" method), a kind of cossic algebra introduced by the Jesuits, was used by both Chinese and Korean scholars. The works of Korean mathematician Nam Pyŏng-Gil (1820-69) include some of the most interesting examples of "dialogues" between the two algebraic methods. At first he believed that the two methods were identical. After he studied the newly recovered Siyuan shu, also originating in the Song-Yuan period, Nam realized that it could be seen as a generalization of the Tianyuan shu, thus enabling the "old" method to solve a wider range of problems than the "new" one. Influenced by the evidential studies in China and the trend of "practical learning" in Korea, Nam changed his mind, favoring the "old" method for its practical usefulness and its status as a distinctive mark of Korean scholarship. He tried to make the "old" method a standard in his country, and he did it in a subtle way. Nam wrote a compendium of mathematics, suggesting that it was a "standard," and in the text he used the "new" method in the imperial canon to endorse the "old" one, and then solved problems with the "old" method. Nam Pyŏng-Gil's case provides an interesting example of the interaction between mathematical knowledge and its social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we make sense of East Asian STS studies? This article traces the debates on this theme in earlier issues of East Asian Science, Technology and Society and analyzes the different perspectives displayed. The author addresses the so-called East Asian distinction by proposing a theoretical approach based on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of assemblages, which differs significantly from Latourian actor network theory. The concept's analytic advantages are illustrated by a case study of Taiwan's campaign to stem HIV transmission among injection drug users. It is hoped that the assemblage approach may enrich the scholarly repertoire of theory and encourage more studies that address the intricate relations among science, politics, culture, and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that describes translations and translators of historian and scientist Thomas S. Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" in East Asia. The first to translate the book into an East Asian language in the late 1960s was Nakayama Shigeru, one of Kuhn's graduate students at Harvard who later became his close colleague. The first Chinese translation of "Structure" was published in 1980.

The author comments on several articles on East Asian science, technology and society (STS) published within the issue. One case study applied Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of assemblages to the HIV harm reduction policy of Taiwan, which is said to reveal the complex nature of East Asian STS. Another article aims to demonstrate the perceived existence of some recognizable features of East Asian STS.

This article explores some possible forms that a special East Asian approach to STS studies might take. The goal is to build a methodology of East Asian STS theories. The first step is the articulation of a theoretical basis for such an approach. The author considers the potential for an East Asian STS theory by looking at two journals: Taiwanese Journal for Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine and East Asian Science, Technology and Society. To encourage regional theory building, the author suggests gathering concepts from different theories into a rudimentary theory or constructing a theory version based on current theories, making it explicit, and developing a family of East Asian versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]