Editor’s Note

This issue sees out 2019, the first year of EASTS’s inclusion in the Arts and Humanities and Social Science Citation Index within Web of Science. While viewing the data in the Journal Citation Reports released earlier this year, I could not help but imagine a ship named EASTS sailing into a boundless ocean of publications. In this ocean, articles, like waves, keep moving and spreading. They converge and diverge on topics, methods, even world views, creating a complicated—and almost overwhelming—mosaic. Where are we? What does East Asia mean in STS studies? Although we have been concerned with these questions since the inception of EASTS, it all becomes more real when accompanied by numbers, graphs, and diagrams.

One attempt to answer such questions can be seen in Wen-yuan Lin and John Law’s recent article “Where Is East Asia in STS?” (2019). Taking Taiwan as an example, Lin and Law provide a conceptual framework to showcase the multiplicity of East Asian STS and to accommodate the related literature of the past two decades. “Region” as a research topic and a spatial metaphor of knowledge can, in their view, be productive. As they state, “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” (115).

I appreciate Lin and Law’s effort to make sense of where East Asia sits within the intellectual architecture of STS. Nonetheless, I would add that Web of Science does not consist only of analyses of scholarship. One of the main functions of such indexing metrics is to follow the authors. Starting with articles they have published, it enables users to know where they are in the population of authors in the same field or discipline, the relationship with the journals where their works are published, and, most important, the research trajectories they are following in their careers. Thus, to modify the question of what East Asia has contributed to STS via EASTS, I might wonder how we provide a place for authors to create meaningful scholarship.

The articles in this issue allow us to showcase the positions our authors occupy in their work on East Asia. Working and living in Singapore, Thijs Willems and Connor Graham, authors of “The Imagination of Singapore’s Smart Nation as Digital Infrastructure: Rendering (Digital) Work Invisible,” take advantage of being critical observers within the infrastructure created by the government. Even so, what they provide is not just an insider’s view on how the state fashions itself as efficiently “smart.” Instead, by clarifying three properties of this digital infrastructure—namely, mundanity, mortality, and materiality—the authors trace for our readers the actual human labor not yet made visible in such imaginaries. The same position also can be found in the article “Do Organization Interests Interfere with Public Communication of Science? An Explorative Study of Public Relations of Scientific Organizations in Taiwan,” written by Yin-Yueh Lo, Chun-Ju Huang, and Hans Peter Peters. Working in one of the research universities in Taiwan, Lo and Huang nonetheless question scientific institutes’ public relation efforts with the collaboration of Peters as an outsider of this system. Their observation reflects an ambiguous position: while welcoming the efforts to make the scientific findings accessible to the public, they notice its limitation. Science communication occupies a small portion of general university public relations, and scientists are usually not well advised in such activities.

In his article “Sparks and Fizzles: Divergent Performances and Patterns of Cambodian Development Projects,” Casper Bruun Jensen situates himself between the foreign experts and local officials in Cambodia and nicely addresses their different expectations in terms of technology transfer. As an ethnographer working on the ground, Jensen is privileged to be able to differentiate the versions of project realities as performed in the dynamics between the two groups of people. Meanwhile, as a keen scholar he further points out that the awareness of such a situation is not evenly distributed, resulting in a “sparks and fizzles” pattern of state development plans as they are put into practice.

Like many EASTS authors on colonial science in East Asia, Jaehwan Hyun, the author of “Racializing Chōsenjin: Science and Biological Speculations in Colonial Korea,” started his research journey as a local scholar. Even so, his interdisciplinary background and international training in and outside of East Asia enables Hyun to bring insight to the age-old themes of race and colonialization. He does so by introducing biological speculation on the origin and nature of Asian races—in this case the Japanese and the Koreans. These “racial sciences,” as Hyun nicely summarizes, were not just used to justify what the colonizers were seeking; as socio-scientific imaginaries, they were also used to satisfy scientific curiosity and to serve as the foundation for political agendas created even after the collapse of the Japanese Empire.

It is certain that the discipline of anthropology in STS has made authors aware of their research positions and the perspectives they take. Emily Martin, winner of the 2019 Bernal Prize, declared as much in her classic paper “Anthropology and the Cultural Study of Science” (1998: 38). “The complicated network of overlapping and crisscrossing characteristics in different sciences,” she wrote, “many of which also occur in a multitude of activities outside of science, allows us to see the openness our concept of the natural sciences actually has.” Her observation can be neatly applied to our own anthropology authors such as Willems, Graham, and Jensen.

Nonetheless, returning to Lin and Law’s inquiry, I would like to point out that the placeness and richness of East Asia matters equally to EASTS authors in producing meaningful, reflexive scholarship. The historical case of how the Koreans were targeted as a productive subject for biological speculations, as Hyun convincingly reveals, shows that this awareness of positions and perspectives can be found not only in anthropology but also in other disciplines in East Asian STS. In fact, we tested this in issue 12.4, in which historian Prasenjit Duara was invited to respond to historian of medicine Warwick Anderson and anthropologist Michael Fischer on their visions of STS with a focus on Southeast Asia. In addition to providing his own view of how history can be refashioned using the ocean metaphor, Duara (2018: 546) powerfully concluded with a reflection on what STS can do with regional studies: “The problem of novelty or innovation in a particular field emerges in an ecology of incremental creativity, adjacent possibilities, third spaces, and ethical plateaus. Moreover, the product of creation is always in process and escapes a place to die or become part of another process, including scientific innovation elsewhere.”

To follow the pathways of our authors, rather than just their scholarship, would seem to be a more exact indicator for locating EASTS in the great tide of scholarship in this field, notably after our inclusion in some of the leading indexing metrics. We are grateful to all the authors whose work makes EASTS a unique journal representing East Asia. In turn, EASTS hopes to be an intellectual anchor for them. We very much appreciate our location in East Asia and welcome scholars to come and be inspired by this region.