Asian STS

STS in Japan and East Asia: Governance of Science and Technology and Public Engagement

This 2009 article by Yuko Fujigaki describes the development of Japanese STS from the 1980s up to the planning processes for the 2010 4S Meeting in Tokyo. The article also focuses on analyzing historical case studies (Minamata disease, itai-itai disease, the Monju nuclear power plant incidents)...Read more

The STS Challenge to Philosophy of Science in Taiwan

Ruey-Lin Chen describes the intensifying relationship between STS and Philosophy of Science in Taiwan.Read more

Work in Progress: Proposal for Comparative Studies on East Asia

The authors of this article use bibliometric techniques to analyze the prevalence of specific themes and approaches in the Journal of Science and Technology Studies (Kagaku Gijutsu Shakai-ron Kenkyū) and East Asian Science, Technology and Society.

Discussion of the intellectual history of the Western concept of "Nature" and its translation into Japanese as "shizen."

Today, "shizen" and "Nature" are taken to be more or less equivalent in today, both referring to a realm of forces and entities independent of human activity, but also available to humans as a...Read more

What is the main argument, narrative and affect of this text?

Introduction: Minor Traditions, Shizen Equivocations, and Sophisticated Conjunctions

Questioning texts (scholarly, activist, news, etc.)

Introduction (2): Japanese STS in Global, East Asian, and Local Contexts

This article introduces the second set of papers on the state of the social studies of science in Japan that emerged from a March 2009 workshop on Asian STS held at the National University of Singapore. Read more

Introduction (1): Japanese STS in Global, East Asian, and Local Contexts

This article by Togo Tsukahara introduces a set of articles published in East Asian Science, Technology and Society in 2009, and asks what constitutes "Asian STS" broadly and Japanese STS specifically. These articles are products of the workshop "Toward a Trans-Asian...Read more

Lei: A Response to “The STS Challenge to Philosophy of Science in Taiwan”

Sean H.-L. Lei responds to Ruey-Lin Chen's characterization of the relationship between STS and the Philsophy of Science in Taiwan. Read more

Attunements to Fog

By characterizing capture as entailing both by relations of connection and relations of disconnection, Whitehead avoids the pitfall of understanding “the act of capture as a relation between two individuals already constituted before the capture itself,” where one party would become...Read more

Darwin Commemorations and Three Generations of Historians of Biology

In this article, Akihisa Setoguchi discusses the history of biology in Japan in terms of three generations of historians defined by their relationship to Darwinism from 1909 to 2009. Specifically, he focuses on their respective assessments of the influence of Edward Sylvester Morse, who...Read more