Branding East Asia with STS: A Farewell Note from the Editor in Chief

I have come to the end of my second term as Editor in Chief of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (EASTS). Such a tenure might not be that unusual for international journals, but it is quite a long time in East Asia, where scholars appreciate working as groups and where decisions are usually done collectively. With an excellent editorial team, during my time here we have achieved several important milestones, including being indexed and abstracted in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in 2016, winning the Infrastructure Award of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in 2018, and becoming a 4S-endorsed journal in 2020. For me, this seems to be the perfect time to stand back and to watch a new team lead this wonderful journal on to its next stage.

To begin, I would like once more to thank all our authors, reviewers, and editorial teams, who together have established EASTS as a strong East Asian brand in STS scholarship. In what follows, I hope to clarify what I mean by “branding” East Asia in reviewing what we have achieved to date. As we often remind ourselves and our readers EASTS cannot become “just another English-language journal.” This was the vision we started out with back in the early 2000s, during the preparatory work for EASTS, when STS-related associations began being founded in East Asia. Sixteen years have now passed, and I believe it’s time for a reappraisal.

Echoing the concept that claims “Asia as method,” the foremost concern in the need for a journal like EASTS is the question of “Why East Asia?” in STS studies. In the development of EASTS, we have offered two sets of metaphors as a means of thinking about this. The first is a conventional one that has to do with East Asia as a region. This vision appeared as early as 2007, in the positioning paper “How Far Can East Asian STS Go?” by our founding Editor in Chief, Daiwie Fu (2007), and it reflected the structure of our editorial team, which consisted of local committees representing Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and regions “outside East Asia.” Under this metaphorical guidance to go far and burn bright, whether this journal could bring in new and unique perspectives became an indicator for this vision, and EASTS kept this promise. In addition to Fu’s final Editor’s Note (Fu 2012), the papers included in that same issue (“What Is Distinctive East Asian STS: Method, Assemblages, or Theories?”) nicely summarized what EASTS had achieved—meaningful case studies, forums that encouraged international conversations, and, most importantly, sixteen thematic issues on East Asia—and where this vision would lead us. Ruey-Lin Chen, guest editor of this present issue, has indicated the limitations inherent in seeking the distinctiveness of East Asian STS and proposed alternative metaphors such as biology (Chen 2012). Even so, the spatial metaphor is still used to characterize the construction of STS in East Asia, as seen in Wen-yuan Lin and John Law’s papers “Provincializing STS: Postcoloniality, Symmetry, and Method” (2017) and “Where Is East Asia in STS?” (2019), in a thematic issue that captured Taiwan’s position in knowledge space (Vol. 9, No. 2), and in Daiwie Fu’s genealogical explication on the formation of STS in East Asia (2020).

Chia-Ling Wu, who served as Editor in Chief from 2013 to 2015, reorganized an editorial board that featured mutual appreciation among the STS traditions in our region. It also became possible to form a new vision for a journal that, instead of exhausting East Asia’s uniqueness—intellectually or historically—experimented with the possibilities of doing quality STS research that is East Asian. This was where the cookery metaphor was called upon, guiding EASTS throughout my years as Professor Wu’s successor. Thematic issues still represent a substantial portion of our publications, and we have been able to accrue a catalogue of issues that pay homage to previous ones while making connections with new territories, new methods, and new perspectives. Let me give just a few examples. Our issue “From Postcolonial to Subimperial Formations of Medicine: Superregional Perspectives from Taiwan and Korea” (Vol. 11, No. 4) extends the discussion set out in one of our earliest issues, on the formation of colonial knowledge by the Japanese Empire (Vol. 1, No. 2); our issue tackling the scandal of the Korean scientist Woo-Suk Hwang (Vol. 2, No. 1) was followed by another focusing on research misconduct in Japan, Korea, and China (Vol. 12, No. 2); in 2008 we produced an issue that captured the globalization of Chinese medicine (Vol. 2, No. 4), following on from which came an issue on contemporary Tibetan medicine (Vol. 7, No. 3) and others that critically reconsidered Asian medicines and STS (Vol. 8, Nos. 1 and 4).

The task of making EASTS more “East Asian” is, therefore, to weave it into a global nexus of STS. When I wrote my inaugural Editor’s Note in 2016 (“a Kitchen Named East Asian STS”) I had not yet fully realized how EASTS could be a venue where scholars freely meet and exchange research ideas, experience, and tastes (Kuo 2016). Yet today EASTS has become a place for doing STS that is both East Asian and global. By way of an example, with our first issue on Indonesian STS in 2017 (Vol. 11, No. 1) we were delighted to be able to incorporate Southeast Asia into our publishing repertoire. Instead of making it a geographical alliance or descending into discussions on our journal’s scope, we facilitated thematic issues such as “Networked Human, Network’s Human: Humans in Networks Inter-Asia” (Vol. 12, No. 4), “Care in Translation: Care-ful Research in Medical Settings” (Vol. 14, No. 1), and “Material Itineraries: Southeast Asian Urban Transformations” (Vol. 15, No. 2), all of which were open to contributions from both East and Southeast Asia and further afield. Another example would be EASTS’s collaboration with Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society. In spite of being on the opposite sides of globe, as sister journals we have shared the same vision and managed to make connections—cross commentaries, joint publications, and creative essays. Not every attempt will bear fruit. But even so, in searching for diversity in unity we have confirmed ourselves as part of a global STS.

Following the foundations laid by Chia-Ling Wu, over the past seven years the particular defining qualities and characters of EASTS have gradually emerged. In addition to peer-reviewed research notes covering new materials, topics, and fields surrounding STS and East Asia, we have continued to carry reviews of books in East Asian languages and even extended our content to Southeast Asian books and to other media, such as films and exhibitions. While commissioning essays under the title of “Informal Histories of East Asian STS” to record the paths that EASTS has taken in its first decade, we also created the News and Events section to capture trends in STS and to introduce our readers to intellectual resources that have benefitted East Asian communities. This has also allowed us to cover STS pioneers we wish to honor, such as Yung Sik Kim, Sang Yong Song and Wann-Sheng Horng, and colleagues now sadly missed, such as Chyuan-Yuan Wu (1961–2018), Aaron Moore (1972–2019), Hongye Fan (1942–2020), and Trevor Pinch (1952–2021).

In the same vein, our journal’s cover designs, such colorful and creative components of our output, have reached a worldwide audience via the “STS Infrastructures” archive (https://stsinfrastructures.org/) and have even been enhanced to meet the trend of digital transformation in STS. They have become more artistically engaging through the introduction of explanations of where the images hail from, and conversations with the artists who created them. We have also invited scholars both within and without STS communities to share their reflections on our covers. These designs have transformed EASTS into both a collection of fresh STS scholarship and a platform that presents East Asia. Through traditional means such as subscription and advertising, we have constructed a website for EASTS; by incorporating, for example, featured multimedia materials such as podcasts, we hope to consolidate East Asian STS as an intellectual collective and to reach out to readers around the world.

The work to make EASTS stand out as a journal with characters could not have been done without the collaboration of our editorial office with our partner publishers—initially Duke University Press and now Routledge—and with Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (NSTC). Robert Dilworth, Jocelyn Dawson, and Nathan Moore at Duke University Press introduced me to the unfamiliar business of publishing. I remember with affection our exchanges of information and ideas at 4S meetings and my visit to their headquarters. The Routledge team, as I have said in previous Editor’s Notes (Vol. 14, no. 4 and Vol. 15, no. 1), are both professional and helpful, and I want to express my special thanks to their Taipei office, in particular Don Low (羅子剛) and Andy Chuang (莊庚祐). They have not only facilitated the local administrative transitions but have also kindly provided world-class promotional services for local academic activities, something no international publisher has done before. Our main sponsor, the National Science Council (NSC), has been with EASTS since its inception. Like EASTS, the NSC has gone through several organizational changes—to the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2014 and then to the NTSC in 2022. Even so, we were scarcely affected by those changes, for which thanks is due to its very capable staff, notably Ms. Hui-Chen Lin (林惠珍), Tai-Ju Tseng (曾黛如), Mei-Hui Hong (洪美惠), and Pei-Shan Li (李佩珊).

Last but not least, my sincere gratitude goes to the assistant editors during my time as editor, in particular Yen Ke (葛雁), Hei Yuen White Pak (白曦源), Yu-Tang Hou (侯昱堂), Anne-Chie Wang (王安琪), Chun-fang Chang (張純芳), Ting-Yu Tsai (蔡庭玉), Yi-Tien Hsu (許益湉), Hsien-Wei Huang (黃獻緯), Hui-Hsi Claire Chuang (莊惠喜), and Elliot Y. N. Cheung (張伊諾) among others. Liam Brown, our copy-editor since 2014, has been helping us with numerous articles and essay, this one included, so that they can be in suitable register as academic works accessible for English native readers. The beautiful covers come from the design of Awai (阿維), arguably one of the founding staffs of EASTS. We thank Awai for the artistic taste introduced to our readers through covers, which, in turn, provide him a venue to meet an audience he does not expect as a commercial graphic designer.

It was these “invisible hands” that kept the office running smoothly, turning dreams into concrete plans and actions. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek was once asked “Why Are We Creative?” and his response was striking: he equated creativity with monotonous work on sorting out ideas (Vaske 2018). Looking back on my modest journey in pushing forward East Asian STS, I cannot agree more. When I took charge of the editorial office, I was aware that as a trusted journal for authors and readers the primary mission for EASTS was to maintain its high quality through the publishing process. If EASTS has achieved anything which might be praised as creative under my editorship, it has resulted from a team of such wonderful assistants who have taken my often fleeting and embryonic ideas and given them form and direction.

John Donne rightly inspires us with the poem “No man is an island,” in which “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” During my journey with EASTS, it has felt as though every scholar I have met and worked with is very much a part of an expanding and fertile STS continent. In a welcome note I wrote for our editorial board members back in 2019, I quoted an African proverb: “If you want to walk fast, walk alone; but if you want to walk far, walk together.” I have been so blessed to witness the transformation of STS communities—in East Asia and beyond—who as editors, contributors, readers, and potential collaborators have demonstrated such academic vitality in response to the trend toward global STS and such resilience in the face of the Covid pandemic.

I firmly believe that it is now time to brand East Asia with STS, for in STS we share common goals, values, and commitments. Indeed, I am proud to see this already happening and delighted to see that this mission that will be carried forward by such an able team. At his farewell concert in 1967, Gerald Moore, the greatest accompanist who had performed with star recitalists and opera singers, ended an amazing night with a solo piece—a piano arrangement of Schubert's An die Musik. I personally feel the same as I finish writing this note. Much as Moore did for the role he carved out for himself, I would like to sign off with a piece entitled “To East Asian STS,” something which might put the finishing touch to my professional career as an “intellectual accompanist” in such substantial, meaningful ways. For a wonderful seven years with EASTS, I am thankful from the bottom of my heart.