This paper examines the debate in the wake of the 2007 flood in Jakarta, the biggest one to occur in the city's history. By analyzing textual sources both online and in the archives as well as interviews with several actors in the debate, I demonstrate that a new sociopolitical condition in Indonesia facilitated a vibrant discourse in the wake of a so-called -natural disaster.‖ In a democratizing society such as Indonesia, state actors no longer monopolized the social production of a -risk object‖ or a source of danger or harm. I show that the Indonesian public, who participated in the debate, shaped -networks of risk objects‖ either by -emplacing‖ a risk object (i.e. defining an entity as an object and linking it to a potential harm) or by -displacing‖ it (i.e. challenging the existence of a risk object or delinking it from a putative danger) (Hilgartner, 1992). These non-state actors managed to insert themselves into a sphere once dominated by the technocrats, in large part because the press was no longer controlled by the state. In doing so they exposed the messiness and vulnerability of the city's water management system. The -risk objects‖ they identified to run the whole gamut of entities that make up the entire Jakarta's water management sociotechnical system, which includes water technologies, laws, practices, institutions, conditions, policies, and the environment.

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During the opening panel at the recent Society for the Social Studies of Science/Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnologia (4S/ESOCITE) meeting in Buenos Aires, the 4S president (and editor of this journal), Gary Downey, challenged us to move beyond the traditional linear model of knowledge creation and utilization by reflecting on how many Science and Technology Studies scholars pursue novel ways of acting upon the world through scaling up their scholarship. This critical participation piece describes our attempt to forge an international research forum in the wake of the 2011 East Japan Disaster that constitutes one such attempt to produce scalable scholarship. Inspired by the deep reflexivity of autoethnography, this account examines the tensions inherent to such an endeavor, including the tensions between scholarship and engagement; personal and professional goals; research ethics and different international standards for scholarship; and the desire to make engineering visible versus the dominant STS (science and technology studies) framing of disasters research. This account should serve as a useful guide for others seeking to build international collaborations involving engineering studies, and other similar efforts to produce scalable scholarship. IntroductionDuring the opening panel at the recent 4S/ESOCITE meeting in Buenos Aires, the 4S president (and editor of this journal), Gary Downey, challenged us to move beyond the traditional linear model of knowledge creation and utilization by reflecting on how many Science and Technology Studies scholars pursue novel ways of acting upon the world through scaling up their scholarship. 1 Drawing on the performative idiom of 'making and doing', this was a clear call to pay attention to the human and intersubjective dimensions of our interactions with the technoscientific world. We might contrast this call against the ontological turn in the history and philosophy of science. 2 Within Downey's call are therefore the echoes of a common critique found at least since Latour's fruitful investigations into non-human agency, namely that we must retain a focus on human actors as willful agents in order to understand how we can intervene in the world through our work in science and technology studies (STS). This will be one such account, namely an attempt by me and several of my close colleagues to forge an international research forum and collaboration in the wake of the 2011 East Japan Disaster.Given that I am telling this story in this journal, let me point to the engineering dimensions of the disaster. Several days after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and the associated tsunami inundated the East Japan coastline including the backup diesel generators for the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant, US media coverage shifted almost exclusively to the failed attempts to prevent a nuclear meltdown at the plant. For once, instead of engineers being relegated to the background, we saw repeated images of blue work-suited Tokyo Electric Power Company engineering executives ...

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