A Voyage to East Asian STS Theories; Or, What Might Make an STS Theory East Asian

Chen, Ruey-Lin

doi:10.1215/18752160-1905045

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Its international spread has reshaped the discipline in many ways, pushing it from its original core focus on technoscience in Euro-America to embrace agendas that include colonial and postcolonial asymmetries; the character of regional, national, and local technoscientific practices; and an increased concern with the importance of space and place in the ordering of science and technology. Though it has been argued that it is impossible to write Asian grounded theory (Dutton 2002), the authors who publish in EASTS have explored the possible character of an East Asian STS, asked how it might be distinctive, considered the relations between East Asian STS and East Asian Studies, and critically examined how STS in East Asia might best relate theoretically and substantively to Euro-American STS (Fan 2007;Fu 2007;Chen 2008;Anderson 2009b;Tsukahara 2009;Chen 2012;Fan 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where Is East Asia in STS?

Lin

Law

2019

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Jo

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The international spread of STS has reshaped the discipline in many ways, pushing it from its original core focus on technoscience in Euro-America to embrace new and wider agendas in other locations. For the practitioners of STS in East Asia, the complex relations between geographical region and forms of knowledge in technoscience are firmly on the agenda, and they have conceptualized these in a range of different and sometimes contradictory ways. The multiplicity of East Asian STS is also reflexively refracted in different assumptions about the character and location of the discipline in relation to other regional versions of STS. In what follows we simplify the complexities of a large and sophisticated body of writing by exploring a double question. On the one hand, we ask how scholars conceptualize the location of East Asian technoscience in the world. And on the other, a related question, we consider how they imagine the location of East Asian STS in relation to other forms of STS. We suggest that it is possible to identify at least six distinct spatially related strategies for understanding knowledge and technoscience in the East Asian literatures. In this article, we characterize these as diffusion, distortion, circulation, localizing, translation, and mistranslation and argue that East Asian STS may be understood as distinctive in the way it collaborates with other forms of STS not only because it identifies and characterizes other and different East Asian empirical contexts, but also because it makes possible the exploration of alternative and situated methodological approaches.Keywords East Asia ▪ East Asian STS ▪ one-world world ▪ performativity ▪ translation Acknowledgment This article is a belated and retitled contribution to the EASTS special issue "We Have Never Been Latecomers!?" We are grateful to the jorunal editors for their patience and advice. We are also grateful to Chi-ling Wu (吳嘉苓), Daiwie Fu (傅大為), and Rur-Bin Yang (楊儒賓) for discussion and advice. Wen-yuan Lin would like to thank Taiwanese Ministry of Science and Technology that funded the research projects for this research. All translations from the Chinese are our own, unless otherwise indicated.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On controlled mistranslations between forms of generalizing in the "postcolonial moment" of encounters, seeVerran 2002;Jensen et al 2011;Mohácsi and Morita 2013;Jensen 2014;and Mol 2014. This is also a feature of "theoretical creolization" in East Asian STS(Chen 2012;Fan 2012;Fu 2013;Chen 2014). …”

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confidence: 99%

Where Is East Asia in STS?

Lin

Law

2019

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Jo

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“…As is the very fact of placing science and technology at the center of society, and to make them a gold standard to measure the relative progress of different societies (e.g., Latour 2005). Over the last years, STS has gone through a reckoning of its own trajectory and Euro-American bias, with different voices calling out the undue influence over traditions and regions (Arellano-Hernández and Morales-Navarro 2019; Chen 2012; Kolopenuk 2020; Law and Lin 2017; Rajão, Duque, and De’ 2014). This has materialized in a call to decenter the conversation away from Euro-American topics by creating a different institutionality organized around professional organizations, journals, and topics born in peripheries.…”

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confidence: 99%

At the Crossroads of Sociology and STS

Rubio,

Guerra

2023

Sociological Perspectives

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“… 2. Togo Tsukahara (2009) has explored dependent–independent relationships; Daiwie Fu (2012), Ruey-Lin Chen (2012a, 2012b) and Jia-shin Chen (2012) have examined and reflected on the distinctiveness of East Asian Science and Technology Studies (STS)/theory; Fa-ti Fan (2012) has suggested the need for critical regionalism; Susan Moon (2012) has pointed to the importance of intuition; Gregory Clancey (2009) has argued that it is important to take up local materials in the STS rubric; and Warwick Anderson (2012) has tentatively talked of Asia as method. …”

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confidence: 99%

A correlative STS: Lessons from a Chinese medical practice

Lin

Law

2014

Soc Stud Sci

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How might Science and Technology Studies learn more from the intersection between 'Western' and 'other' forms of knowledge? In this article, we use Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's writing on equivocal translation to explore a moment of encounter in a Chinese Medical consultation in Taiwan in which a practitioner hybridizes Chinese Medicine and biomedicine. Our description is symmetrical, but creates a descriptive equivocation in which 'Western' analytical terms are used to describe a 'Chinese' medical reality. Drawing on the history of Chinese Medicine, we argue that the latter is not analytical, but 'correlative' in a specifically 'Chinese' manner that explores patternings, flows, and propensities in local collections of things and symptoms. In particular, it both handles difference without seeking to unearth stable causal mechanisms and absorbs new elements including relevant features of biomedicine. We conclude by briefly considering the scope of a possible post-colonial and 'correlative' STS and show that a 'correlative' description of the same Chinese Medical consultation would differ markedly from one making use of 'Western' analytical assumptions.

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A Voyage to East Asian STS Theories; Or, What Might Make an STS Theory East Asian

Cited by 12 publications

References 15 publications

Where Is East Asia in STS?

Where Is East Asia in STS?

At the Crossroads of Sociology and STS

A correlative STS: Lessons from a Chinese medical practice

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