Editor’s Note: Past and Future

This past July, at Taipei’s National Yang-Ming University, EASTS held its fourth International Journal Conference on East Asian STS. Under the initiative of Prof. Wu Chia-Ling of National Taiwan University’s Department of Sociology, we had a special panel discussion titled “How Far Has EASTS Gone?,” which was undertaken partly as a long-term response to my position paper “How Far Can EASTS Go?” published in the first issue of EASTS in 2007. Since issue 1, we of the EASTS editorial board have worked with many authors and reviewers to publish another twenty-one issues over the last five years. And now I’m writing this editor’s note for issue 6:4, the issue before the final one (7:1) I edit in my editorial term. Our next editor in chief, Professor Wu, will take over the responsibility of leading EASTS beginning with issue 7:2. She will work with the active and talented Professor Li Shang-jen of Academia Sinica as Taiwan’s next associate editor. Chia-Ling has worked with me as associate editor of EASTS since its early conception and preparation in 2006 until the double issue 3:2–3 (2009), before Professor Chu Pingyi succeeded her as associate editor. Thus she has ample experience and enthusiasm for this journal, in addition to her admirable talent and scholarship. I have no doubt that she is the one to lead EASTS as we look to the future.

In my presentation for the panel “How Far Has EASTS Gone?,” I briefly reflected on what we have been doing for the last six volumes. I recapitulate some of my points there to share with you. First, we have published a total of sixteen special/subject issues in the journal’s twenty-two (to date) issues. Some of them originated from specifically East Asian concerns, while others address issues that did not originate in East Asia, with authors mostly from Europe, North America, and Australia/New Zealand. By my count, six subject issues are of the first kind, another six are of the second, and the remaining four are in-between. This is good food for thought, I think. Second, concerning STS “theories” used or adopted in EASTS, as Chen Ruey-Lin explains in this issue, most articles assemble or combine various STS theories in explaining East Asian STS phenomena. There is no article that directly applies a single STS theory in an East Asian context. On the other hand, in EASTS there is no distinctive East Asian STS theory yet, only sophisticated assemblies of (Western) STS theories. Chen’s counting may be arguable, but his result is something worth reflecting upon.

Third, in my presentation I posed three more personal questions. (1) How much public encouragement has EASTS received in the past? If we compare the public encouragement from within East Asia with that from without, actually we have gotten more from outside East Asia (OEA). And EASTS really appreciates the generous encouragement and help from OEA STS scholars. Meanwhile, we need more mutual support and communication within East Asian STS in the next stage of the field’s development.

(2) What social activities in various East Asian professional societies were clearly shaped by EASTS? In Taiwan, not many, admittedly, except some graduate student workshops, the East Asian STS and Area Studies workshop held in 2008, and the recent “Kuhn’s Structure 50: From HPS to STS” workshop held with the Taiwanese Journal for Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine in August 2012. As I worried from the beginning might happen, EASTS was in danger of becoming too international in its scope and thus only loosely connected to Taiwan’s local social worlds.¹ Are such connections too much to ask of an international quarterly journal, always busy in catching up on the next deadline? I do not know, and only time can tell. I do believe that there is still much to be done here, with EASTS having a leading role in generating and coordinating local social activities. To be sure, EASTS has throughout its history been a stimulating point of reference to Taiwan...