News and Events

"Delayed Justice: The RCA Lawsuit" Wins 4S Making and Doing Award

Following their success with the Infrastructure Award and the Bernal Prize, EASTS editors have won yet another 4S award this year. Led by EASTS Editors Wen-Ling Tu and Hsin-Hing Chen, a group of Taiwanese STS scholars joined the 4S Making and Doing exhibition on August 29th, 2018, with the documentary "Delayed Justice: The RCA Lawsuit." The piece was selected from among thirty-four projects as one of three award winners honoring Taiwanese scholars who have participated in the campaign that demanded justice in the RCA lawsuit. The award committee especially noted how this multimedia project and film series told of ongoing STS engagement in articulating the science and translating the law.

"Delayed Justice" presents the two-decade-long RCA struggle that involved thousands of victims and volunteers, including many STS scholars and scientists from various disciplines, and that culminated in the largest and most science-intensive lawsuit in the judicial history of Taiwan. During a lengthy trial about responsibility for illness caused by industrial pollution, many unexpected pieces of evidence were scrutinized and fiercely debated in court. Siding with the plaintiffs, the STS community in Taiwan played an instrumental role in this victory, with its capacity to mobilize diverse experts (e.g., epidemiologists, toxicologists, environmental engineers) to collect data from various countries and to help translate workers' experiences and medical evidence into legal causation.

The campaign gained global attention through 4S. Long before the Supreme Court of Taiwan in August 2018 finally upheld a verdict ordering RCA and its affiliates—General Electric and Thomson Electronics and Technicolor—to pay some NT$564 million (approximately US$18 million) in compensation to 262 plaintiffs, EASTS editors had reported on the case at 4S meetings, most notably during the "Toxic Torts and Persistent Polluters" panels at the 2017 meeting (see "News and Events" in EASTS 11.4) and during our former Editor-in-Chief Chia-Ling Wu's plenary presentation at the 2015 meeting.

Echoing the spirit of Making and Doing, "Delayed Justice" is the first of an eight-part documentary series initiated by STS scholars and filmmakers in Taiwan, including Wen-Ling Tu, Wen-Ling Hong (chairperson of the Taiwan STS Association), Yi-Ping Lin (EASTS advisory editor), Shiang-Yao Liu, Hsin-Hsing Chen, Chen-Yung Lin, Chung-Hsi Lin (EASTS advisory editor), and Yuan Yuan. Their films tell the story of how people came to understand the uncertainties in science and thus how scientific knowledge can be useful for a society facing such pressing matters.

Read more about "Delayed Justice: The RCA Lawsuit" at https://bit.ly/2wDIM1G or the 4Swebirte. A trailer can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAqeM6amSOw.

EASTS to Be Indexed by Web of Science

After two years of evaluation, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal was selected in July 2018 for inclusion in two of Clarivate Analytics flagship indexes. Beginning with volume 10 (2016), our journal's content will now be indexed and abstracted in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index. EASTS's inclusion in the latter, perhaps the best known of Clarivate's indexes, places it in a database of more than thirty-two hundred leading academic journals across fifty-five social science disciplines. And by virtue of its inclusion, EASTS will be eligible for a Journal Impact Factor with the release of Clarivate's 2018 Journal Citation Reports in June 2019.

The editorial team is greatly appreciative of all the effort Duke University Press put in during the application process, and we hope our authors will reap the benefits throughout their academic careers.