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EASTS Celebrates Its First Decade at the 4S Annual Meeting

Founded in 2007, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal is the first English-language journal dedicated to the promotion of STS and the advancement of STS scholarship in East Asia. EASTS has been a witness to how STS is playing an active role in the transformation of a flourishing East Asia, and the journal itself has enjoyed global visibility, as seen at 4S Annual Meetings. Therefore, the 2017 4S Annual Meeting, held in Boston from August 30 to September 2, was the perfect occasion for EASTS to celebrate the achievements of its first decade and to inaugurate a second.

As a part of the 4S Annual Meeting program, four sessions proposed by EASTS editors comprised a one-day workshop titled "Prospects in East Asian Science, Technology and Society" that nicely reflected the locally rooted and problem-based nature of East Asian STS and its intellectual position as STS goes global (a detailed program follows this report). The workshop not only aimed to review the changing landscape of STS through EASTS but also responded to a call for new strategies, trajectories, and visions to find, within East Asia, ways of doing STS that work for East Asia.

The workshop was held in the Public Garden Room of the Sheraton Hotel Boston, and it attracted about fifty scholars, including some EASTS editors, authors, reviewers, and local scholars, most of whom were 4S members. The subject of the first two sessions, which were organized by EASTS editor Hsin-Hsing Chen and his longstanding research colleague Paul Jobin, was "Toxic Torts and Persistent Polluters." Chaired by 4S president-elect and EASTS advisory editor Kim Fortun, each session included four papers that discussed pollution cases and lawsuits in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Unlike the conventional treatment of individual incidents, it was shown that institution, infrastructure, and collectivity are the keys to understanding why pollution events are so persistent in industrial Asia and what the social features of these lawsuits are when victims take action against polluters. As Chen pointed out, "STS scholarship can be very useful in bridging the science-law disparity in public controversies such as toxic tort, as 'translation' in its multiple connotations is an essential craft of the STS trade."

After the EASTS editorial meeting, the theme of the afternoon sessions was "The Sensibilities of East Asian STS," and topics of discussion included the growth of East

Fig. 1.

Workshop participants

Asian STS scholarship through EASTS, the tasks EASTS editors have been taking on, and the fields that might be developed. Chaired by EASTS editor in chief Wen-Hua Kuo, with associate editor Michael Fischer as the discussant, the first session—"Strategies, Trajectories, and Visions"—showcased the journal's editorship and achievements. Founding editor in chief Daiwie Fu assessed the journal's first decade, highlighting intellectual threads that reflect how East Asia and STS have evolved in a globalized era. Echoing Fu, Kuo's presentation used examples from four special issues of EASTS on traditional Asian medicines to show the various ways in which the journal has been engaging with an emerging scholarship that, with the use of STS concepts, has attempted to make sense of how Asian medicines have become what they are

Fig. 2.

EASTS editorial meeting

today. Associate editors Hee-Je Bak and Togo Tsukahara were scheduled for a presentation on new challenges and tasks for EASTS; however, Tsukahara was forced to cancel his trip at the last minute due to an unexpected missile threat from North Korea. Bak, a veteran sociologist specializing in science policy, made his presentation and convincingly called for new STS research agendas to cope with the infrastructural changes in science and technology research in South Korea. Alternatively and as a result of the dramatic struggles the Japanese STS community has faced since the devastating 2011 tsunami, Tsukahara provided (via Michael Fischer's summary) a more radical agenda that urges for reform by resetting research purposes and revising research methodology.

The second afternoon session was chaired by...