Emergence, Social and Cognitive Trends, and the Next Step? Two Decades of STS in Contemporary Taiwan

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of EASTS for the invitation to write this article and for the patience shown during my busy days of retirement. I also thank Wen-Hua for his comments on the original manuscript and Yi-Tien Hsu for her help and effort in providing a suitable image for this article.

Notes

¹ SSR: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), TJPHS: Taiwan Journal for Philosophy and History of Science (ten issues in total, 1992–98).

² This refers to Taiwanese Journal of Studies for Science, Technology, and Medicine. It was later adopted by Taiwanese STS Association as it official journal, which it remains, with no. 28 just out now.

³ This email list has long been sponsored by Daiwie Fu. It has now been transferred to Googlegroups as [email protected].

⁴ Taiwan STS Virtual Community 臺灣 STS 虛擬社群 (2001–09), sponsored by Daiwie Fu. The original site is sts.nthu.edu.tw/. A great part of this very rich site is still available from the Wayback Machine: archive.org/web/.

⁵ From 2007 to the present, two EASTS articles, published in 2009 and 2010, plus recently the journal itself, have been awarded a number of prizes by 4S and other academic societies.

⁶ But in terms of large technological systems and international politics including the Cold War, Kuo-hui Chang (2013) had exposed the issue of nuclear power in a new light.

⁷ This television series was awarded Taiwan’s 2019 Golden Bell Award for “Documentary in Natural Sciences.”

⁸ I have discussed more about this first trend in the postscript “The Developments and Prospects of East Asian STS” to my new book (Fu 2019).

⁹ Consider Atsuro Morita’s very interesting comments (2017) and Warwick Anderson’s most recent critical reflection on their efforts (2018: 504).

¹⁰ Since the beginning of SSK/STS in the 1970s, SSK has had a close alliance with UK anthropologists, many of whom had famously maintained a symmetrical position between European rationality and African tribal rationality. And early STS people thus learned a lot of this symmetry from them. Consult chap. 4 of Fu 2019.

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Daiwie Fu

Daiwie Fu is emeritus professor and former distinguished professor at the National Yang-Ming University and founding editor-in-chief of EASTS. Having just published a new book in Chinese, A Genealogical History of the Emergence and Multiple Constructions of STS (2019), he is preparing the groundwork for a new book on the future of East Asian STS. Previously he published a book on gender and medicine titled Assembling the New Body: Gender/Sexuality, Medicine, and Modern Taiwan (2005).