"Dear Pinchy …" Remarks on Trevor Pinch's Bernal Prize

The Society for Social Studies of Science Prize Committee kindly invited EASTS's former editor Chia-Ling Wu to be one of three panelists at the 2018 Bernal Prize Ceremony for Professor Trevor Pinch in Sydney. In her speech, reproduced in revised form below, Professor Wu shared, on behalf of EASTS, our appreciation of how Professor Pinch has helped to build the East Asian STS community. Professor Pinch generously allowed us to share the video of his two inspiring lectures in Taiwan in 2006 (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb90vjYBQW4). For more about Professor Pinch and his being awarded the Bernal Prize, please see "News and Events" in issue 12.3.

—EASTS Editorial Office

"It is a great honor to have the opportunity at the Bernal Prize Ceremony to share with you how the East Asian STS community encountered Trevor Pinch. What I am going to tell may not be the complete story of our encounter. I do hope to get more stories about Trevor's contributions from other East Asian colleagues.

"Most East Asian STS scholars probably first came to know Trevor through the Golem series. The Golem was translated into Japanese in 1997, the very first translation in East Asia; it was renamed The File of Seven Scientific Events (七つの科学事件ファ イル), sounding like a title for a mystery movie. The simplified Chinese version of The Golem came out in 2001, and the Korean one in 2005. Some distinguished STS scholars devoted themselves to the translation work, including Yoichiro Murakami (村上陽一郎) for the Japanese version of The Golem at Large in 2001, and Shang-jen Li (李尚仁) for the Chinese version of Dr. Golem, published in Taiwan in 2016. For the past twenty years, scholars in East Asian countries have worked hard on STS community building. The Golem series has served as an important foundation for our knowledge, learning, and pedagogy. Today, local textbooks have been developed, including Yoko Fujigaki's edited STS textbook of Japanese cases, which was soon translated in Taiwan. Our intra-Asian mutual learning has benefitted greatly from the inspiration of the classic Golem series and has gradually produced its own version.

Figure 1.

Trevor Pinch (standing, tenth person from the left, hand on his stomach) with the participants of the Teaching STS Workshop in Hobe Port, a historic site in Tamsui, Taipei. Photo taken in February 2006.

"These beautiful book covers show the different ways the name 'Pinch' has been rendered in East Asian languages: ピンチ, 平區, 平奇, and 핀치. However, once Trevor had face-to-face contact with the East Asian STS community, he was immediately given a new local name—Pinchy! Trevor was invited to teach at the summer school at Korea University in Seoul in 2005 and 2006. He was super popular among students, earning himself the highest possible evaluation for these semesters. It was Korean students who gave him the nickname, drawing on that most popular of traditional Korean dishes, kimchi. Ever since Trevor told me of his new name, I have always addressed him as Pinchy.

"Pinchy was invited to Taipei for an STS workshop to promote STS teaching in 2006. He and Nelly Oudshoorn were the main speakers. A Golem riding the SCOT's bicycle was the workshop poster's logo. At our request, Trevor gave a very inspiring interactive lecture on how he had taught the introductory STS course What Is Science? at Cornell since 1995. Pinchy told us that it was his first time giving a talk of this kind. He shared with us the curriculum design, key concepts, teaching materials, some useful teaching tips (e.g., using cooking a cheese soufflé to demonstrate the idea of tacit knowledge), and what works (case studies) and what doesn't. The way he taught us was very telling—he is a talented teacher who makes STS exciting. And I am still using the Gestalt switch image he provided, a Jesus-like man which I could not see through for three hours, to illustrate Thomas Kuhn's idea on the theory-ladenness of observation. Through the translated Golem series, as well as the...