East Asian Science, Technology and Society

This essay discusses the recent rise of interest in the global history of science. It first explains the central characteristics of this new scholarly development and distinguishes it from the earlier projects of studying science in a world-historical context pursued by George Sarton and Joseph Needham. It then identifies and critiques two images or models that have been widely adopted by scholars to discuss science in a global context, namely, circulation and trade. Finally, the essay considers the relationship between the global and the regional and suggests that it is time for East Asian STS to take a global turn.

F.-t. Fan

The Global Turn in the History of Science

Anin Luo

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal

Animal Scientism: Making Biology Experimental in Republican China

This article traces the rise of agricultural development in Taiwan and its interactions with the rest of the world, emphasizing the agency and transformations of the Global South. In the 1920s, American scientists and missionaries began experimenting with development in China through local universities and villages. From then until the early 1970s, American, Chinese, and Taiwanese scientists integrated farmers' associations, laboratory research, agricultural extension, and applied industrial research. Starting in the 1960s with the rise of the Cold War, Taiwanese technocrats packaged their practices of agricultural development into missions sent abroad to Southeast Asia and Africa and in new multinational research centers established in Taiwan. This approach toward development combined different schools of thought: the modernist “Green Revolution” practice of massive technical inputs and selected, high-yielding crop cultivars, and socially oriented practices that utilized grassroots methods of knowledge collection and dissemination. The Taiwanese emphasized their successes in both high technology and social reformist approaches when implementing development in the Global South. Contrary to narratives that portray development as a high modernist project enacted by the Global North upon the Global South, this article argues that Global South actors co-opted and redeployed development for their own political purposes, following their own historical experiences with development, and in accordance with their own visions of modernity.

J. Lin

Sowing Seeds and Knowledge: Agricultural Development in Taiwan and the World, 1925-1975

The field of engineering ethics emerged in the early 1990s in Taiwan, following the example of the United States, which had developed this field over the previous three decades. The Institute of Engineering Education Taiwan (IEET) recommends that students of engineering schools study engineering ethics so as to acquire an “understanding of professional ethics and social responsibility.” For the most part, the scenarios used for teaching are simplistically real or hypothetical ones framed by the codes of ethics, or case studies borrowed directly from the United States. In this paper I argue that adding components of STS studies, especially historical-sociological analyses of real cases to engineering ethics, is beneficial and more consonant with IEET requirements, and I draw on the concepts of STS studies to analyze a local case study as an illustration of this.

D.-Y. Tai

Engineering Ethics, STS, and the China Airlines CI-611 Accident

This article analyzes the development and reception processes for the pet-type robots known as AIBO in order to explore the multiple ways in which technoscientific practices make realities of the world. I investigate how practices of comparison work in the emergence of a new technological artifact. Specifically, this article focuses on a singular form of comparison, plastic comparison: comparison both shaping things and shaped by things. AIBO had been designed and understood by comparing the device with various existing entities: a technologically sophisticated machine, a pet animal, a computer game, and a family member. I analyze the way these comparisons gave this robot multiple shapes when it was developed in the laboratory, made it famous through media attention, and then created acceptance by its owners. I show that focusing on plastic comparisons is a useful way of exploring the multiplicity of technological practices that overcomes the limits of existing approaches in STS, such as the social construction of technology and actor-network theory.

A. Kubo

Plastic Comparison: The Case of Engineering and Living with Pet-Type Robots in Japan

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 and modernity—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.

Max Hirsh

Angela Ki Che Leung

Izumi Nakayama

Infrastructure, Modernity, and the Technologies of Everyday Life: Insights from a Collaborative Research Project on the Making of Modern East Asia

Up until the 1960s, the techno-nationalistic mode prevailed in the Cold War environment. Since the 1960s, however, the techno-globalistic mode emerged in Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs) and was eventually adopted by China. This new trend reversed the technology gap, negating the veracity of dependency theory. This tendency will continue until eventually equality is attained, provided that techno-nationalism never regains its formerly overwhelming power.

S. Nakayama

Techno-nationalism versus Techno-globalism

Recent scholarship on the history of science in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has provided new horizons for exploring questions about the nature and epistemology of socialist science, its epistemic virtues, its knowledge-producing practices, its geographical imagination and networks of communication and exchange, and its relations to the Chinese state and state building. In this essay the author uses a focus on practice to extrapolate implications and tendencies that he sees as unifying recent studies, and he clarifies their contributions to the current understanding of the history of science in the PRC. Particularly with respect to Chinese state-science relations and the nature of Maoist mass science, a focus on practice illuminates how recent scholarship has queried and interrogated unitary conceptions of the Chinese state and science, highlighted transnational connections and movements, and deepened our understanding of Maoist mass science.

Jia-Chen Fu

Practice and the History of Science in the PRC: A Historiographic Reflection

This essay explores the scientific lives of two Republican-period institutions: the Henry Lester Institute of Medical Research, based in Shanghai; and the Chongqing No. 3 Children's Home. Despite their differences, these two spaces sheltered and nurtured scientific experimentation and functioned as heterotopic sites that controlled who could produce scientific knowledge and which kinds of scientific objects could become visible. By examining closely the research work of Bernard E. Read, Stephen M. K. Hu, and the team of nutrition scientists from National Jiangsu Medical College, this article argues that how space became hospitable for scientific experiment and how science refashioned space were mutually constitutive processes. This process of coproduction was critical to and, at times, contested through expressions of expertise.

短名	East. Asian. Sci. Technol. Soc.
Journal Impact	0.82
国际分区	HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE(Q2)
期刊索引	SCI Q3中科院 4 区

ISSN	1875-2152, 1875-2160
h-index	20
国内分区	社会学(4区)社会学地域研究(4区)社会学亚洲研究(4区)社会学科学史与科学哲学(4区)

涉及主题	政治学法学历史地理社会学哲学考古生物计算机科学医学经济中国艺术认识论工程类
出版信息	出版商: Routledge，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 非开源
基本数据	创刊年份: 2008，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:0.00%， Gold OA占比: 48.75%

East Asian Science, Technology and Society

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Animal Scientism: Making Biology Experimental in Republican China

Infrastructure, Modernity, and the Technologies of Everyday Life: Insights from a Collaborative Research Project on the Making of Modern East Asia

Practice and the History of Science in the PRC: A Historiographic Reflection

Houses of Experiment: Making Space for Science in Republican China

Sowing Seeds and Knowledge: Agricultural Development in Taiwan and the World, 1925-1975

Engineering Ethics, STS, and the China Airlines CI-611 Accident

Plastic Comparison: The Case of Engineering and Living with Pet-Type Robots in Japan

The Global Turn in the History of Science

Techno-nationalism versus Techno-globalism

The Global Turn in the History of Science

Animal Scientism: Making Biology Experimental in Republican China

Sowing Seeds and Knowledge: Agricultural Development in Taiwan and the World, 1925-1975

Engineering Ethics, STS, and the China Airlines CI-611 Accident

Plastic Comparison: The Case of Engineering and Living with Pet-Type Robots in Japan

Infrastructure, Modernity, and the Technologies of Everyday Life: Insights from a Collaborative Research Project on the Making of Modern East Asia

Techno-nationalism versus Techno-globalism

Practice and the History of Science in the PRC: A Historiographic Reflection

Houses of Experiment: Making Space for Science in Republican China