Making STS Singaporean

1 Early Days

The first time I was introduced to the president of my university, on the periphery of a crowded academic meeting, he naturally asked what field I was in. Without thinking I said “STS” and immediately regretted it. “History” would have been the safer choice. There was no STS department or program at the National University of Singapore (NUS), or anywhere else in my newly adopted country, and few people I’d met there had heard that acronym. “That means science, technology, and society,” I quickly added, hoping I wasn’t sowing even more confusion. He was an engineer. “Ah, I do STS too!” he exclaimed to my surprise, with eyes lit. “I’m attending the STS conference in Japan.” I wasn’t aware of any such conference, but before I could clarify, he was being introduced to another assistant professor, and I stood there puzzled. It turned out the Japanese prime minister had begun hosting high-level “STS Forums” in the early 2000s with invitations to the presidents of major companies and, apparently, universities as well. “Science and Technology in Society” was how they were styled, but no matter. Even if hardly anyone else in Singapore had heard the acronym, the president of my university had. Just maybe, I thought, we could build on that.

When I arrived in Singapore in 1999, the acronym STS had only one manifestation, as the name of a popular undergraduate course taught by the sociologist Zaheer Baber, who was destined to become a close colleague and lifelong friend. That same year, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) founded the Information and Communications Management Programme, which in 2001 was placed under the directorship of Govindan Parayil, who had a PhD in STS from Virginia Tech. I was hired at the same time to be the historian of science and technology in the history department, which was likewise a new departure for my colleagues there. Govindan would leave in 2004 to become vice-rector of the United Nations University, and Zaheer would depart soon after to take an All-Canada chair in Toronto. But both had planted important seeds.¹

Was it the realization of the coming new millennium, burgeoning use of the Internet, fear of the Y2K bug, or the steady growth and reputation of STS as a field that caused my social science and humanities colleagues to begin seeing technoscience as a relevant category around the year 2000? It was likely all those things and more. Singapore had been developing a high-tech global profile over the previous decade, thanks in part to its branding as an “intelligent island” in a BBC documentary (Maslin 1990), and a more dystopian counterbranding by William Gibson (1993). And in 2000 the city-state would launch a biomedical science initiative intent on making Singapore the “Biopolis of Asia.” But social science and humanities research in Singapore had yet to catch up, to strategically focus on the historical, social, and cultural questions that this phenomenon posed. This was partly due to the very specialized nature of academic departments (and hence their research) in the commonwealth university model, which NUS then still followed. That would radically change over the next decade, however, as NUS went from being a largely undergraduate teaching institution to a globally focused research university with a substantial number of interdisciplinary programs. This transformation made it possible to mount an argument for STS as one of the most relevant fields for understanding Singapore, and Asia, in the twenty-first century. NUS fit the profile of universities around the world that had launched STS initiatives, having a strong investment in science, technology, engineering, and math (the STEM disciplines) but important ambitions in the humanities and social sciences as well. STS could serve as a bridge. These were compelling arguments, but they weren’t accepted automatically. Making STS Singaporean took time, energy, luck, and most important, patronage.

Events also helped. When I arrived in 1999 the philosopher Alan K. L. Chan was chairing the local organizing committee of the Ninth International Conference on the History of Science in East Asia, and he soon enlisted my...