Itineraries to a “Happy, Ordinary Place” for Future STS

In the evening of 7 May 2021 (EST), over one hundred scholars around the world–many of them East Asian–gathered in cyberspace to attend the Reischauer Institute Japan Forum Lecture, delivered by Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama of Harvard University, a long-time supporter of EASTS. The theme of the lecture was premodern Edo (now Tokyo) as seen through Japanese prints. Professor Kuriyama’s intellectual charm turned these everyday images into vivid scenes from which emerged a new perspective on everyday life in the nineteenth-century capital, while “happy, ordinary places” such as crowded markets and busy commercial streets were transformed into inspirational tools for a modern audience reflecting on the regular life they had missed so much during the Covid pandemic. As the speaker concluded, “these prints prompt us, ultimately, to reflect anew not only on the imagination of everyday life in late Edo Japan but also on our own horizons of happiness.”

With his thorough knowledge of such images–which used to be obscure but are now a common research source for Japanese studies–Professor Kuriyama was a pioneer in taking them out of their usual contexts of art history and Edo culture using visual media–first animated lecture slides, then trailers and film clips for courses, and videos for academia. Technically simple yet still sophisticated, his visual presentations have grown to become evocative pieces set in a welcoming environment that communicates its content so very comfortably–Kuriyama the professor sitting against a well-chosen and appropriate background, talking enthusiastically to his audience, accompanied by his “assistant” (a teddy bear wearing a Harvard sweater). Not until Covid did academia start familiarizing itself with teaching and interacting in such virtual settings. It was no surprise that Professor Kuriyama concluded his lecture with a slide of a Zoom conference–a virtual venue that will perhaps emerge as a “happy, ordinary place” for future scholars.

There’s no need for us to re-rehearse imaginaries of exotic places and historical fields through visual threads–illustrated newspapers, postcards, souvenir picture-books and tourist guides, to name just a few. Nor do we need to repeat the general trend in scholarly publishing toward global and digital. There has been an increasing drive toward understanding non-Western regions and their perspectives,¹ and traditional ways of academic circulation, notably via journal subscription and on-site conferences, have begun to fall short in attracting a new generation of academics who have already incorporated digital databases and web surfing not only into their professional training but also their everyday lives. To accommodate these shifts, we need infrastructures, such as robust cyber networks, to reach out to places we have not yet been and to facilitate the accessibility and stability of the research material there. More importantly, we need to consider archiving academic content that lies beyond simple text–not only digitized primary sources but also intellectual items such as presentation slides, videos and films, and on-line events such as this Reischauer Institute Japan Forum Lecture.

EASTS has these changes keenly in mind as we expand our disciplinary and territorial coverage beyond East Asia proper. One latest result of this effort, as readers will see in this issue, is “Material Itineraries,” a reflective collection on Southeast Asian STS. I shall leave the introduction to its Cambodia-based guest editor, Casper Bruun Jensen, for whose editorial artistry I am very grateful. For now, just an observation here noting that since we produced our all-Indonesia issue (vol. 11, no. 1) there has been a growing STS interest in this transitional region lying between Australia and East Asia, and that EASTS published a mini symposium on the theoretical position there (vol. 12, no. 4) before moving onto the making of this current issue. The production was admittedly taxing, and it could not have been done so beautifully without collaboration with Casper and our connections to those who know both STS and this region so well.

We are also delighted to take this opportunity to formally introduce the visual initiatives that will go hand-in-hand with the digital/global transformation of EASTS. We have reported on various occasions about our projects, including a digital archive of the covers of previous issues and the reorganization of our cover team, starting with this current volume. Having joined forces with Routledge, we feel it is time to offer clearer explanations of these initiatives, beyond a simple expectation of designing more attractive covers or incorporating more visual materials into our journal.

As Professor Kuriyama so kindly put it in his essay for EASTS, “Covers and the Poetics of Communication” (vol. 15, no. 1), key to our attempt is a readership that not only views images as accessories to written papers but also thinks with them in forming scholarly ideas. As he so masterfully states:

The cover is the one aspect of a journal issue that is intently focused on readers rather than authors. If we often find journal covers more engaging and poetic than the academic articles within, it is because they are deliberately designed to engage, because they approach us as poets (from Greek, poein, “to make”), as co-creators of meaning, as creative partners in communication. Instead of treating us as passive listeners to a monologue, they address us as active participants in a dialogue. Covers intimate that the facts and ideas articulated by the authors are only part of a greater web of unspoken meanings and not-yet-noticed connections – that communication is, in the end, an open-ended riddle that each reader must solve in her own way (p. 84).

Sharing that same vision, our mission is clear: believing in their ability to inspire, we pay equal attention to curating the visual parts of this journal as well as the textual.

Take, for example, the cover of our thematic issue on citizen science (vol. 13, no. 2). Our cover team member Yu-Ju Chien likes it, for it “vividly illustrates the intertwining relationships between human, nonhuman animals, and technology; as well as how scientific discoveries are produced through heterogeneous networks and collaborative processes.” But from there attentive readers may relate Chien’s reading of this cover to Donna Haraway’s ideas in When Species Meet (Haraway 2007), imaging how science can be done via a complex deliberative process that involves human, animal, and perhaps spiritual citizens.

The essence of our visual initiatives, therefore, is relational. It intends to make possible connections by assembling, juxtaposing, and rearranging old and new, traditional and modern, routine and spectacular, and, last but not least, ordinary and exotic. We believe this is in accord with an STS which, at least on an ideal level, always seeks innovation. We have reached out to artistic colleagues and to materials not usually considered as “STS,” and we hope to bring more within our ambit as our journal goes forward.

As Professor Kuriyama foresaw in an interview over a decade ago (Timmerman 2010), “No one has any sense of what the future will hold … Really, it’s all about individual creativity.” We don’t know exactly which destinations these visual itineraries will lead our readers to, as planners and companions on our East Asian STS journeys, but we hope that EASTS will become a “happy, ordinary place” for scholars in a digital age–over phones, tablets, e-book readers, and computer screens. Seek us out and be happy there!

Notes

¹ Recent initiatives include an expanding regional/global “TransAsiaSTS” Network transformed from the Asia-Pacific STS Network and “Global STS” network led by former 4S president and EASTS editor Kim Fortun and her colleagues, mainly in Asia. More information about these initiatives can be found at a 4S supported website “STS Infrastructures” (https://stsinfrastructures.org/).