Editor's Note: Prospects for STS and the COVID-19 Pandemic

While curating the material for this issue, I found myself unable to avoid one particularly tough situation that goes to the heart of East Asia and STS. As a journal dedicated to analyzing the dynamics of science and society in society and to calling for action on it, what can EASTS do during a pandemic that came into the academic spotlight—first in the life sciences and later in the social sciences—in January 2020? Will EASTS join other journals and offer professional arguments, or will it hold fire until the situation becomes clearer?

Take the American Sociological Association's Contexts as an example. It was among the social science journals that provided information when COVID-19 was considered to be an epidemic mainly affecting East Asia. As the disease has spread to other continents, so has the call for papers studying COVID-19's global impacts. On the one hand, as academics we understand the necessity of fulfilling our public responsibility by offering timely scholarly interventions, especially given that EASTS is even closer—geographically and intellectually—to the emerging disease and to the science and technology surrounding it. On the other hand, however, we share concerns that such responses can be considered offensive and opportunistic given the traumatic fact that this virus has infected more than two million people around the world and has caused more than one hundred and fifty thousand deaths (and counting).

Obviously, we are facing a truly extreme and difficult situation, where any attempt to create prompt yet prudent responses is going to be challenging. For STS and the wider social sciences, it is especially important that existing theoretical frameworks be evaluated before they are used for explaining the pandemic. As Warwick Anderson (2020) writes in his criticism of some unsuccessful attempts, "it is all too easy to make mistakes, to mass produce instead fatuity, guesswork, and irrelevance." Empirical investigation, instead of speculation based on limited information, is what Anderson would prescribe for treating the COVID-19 pandemic.

So in the spirit of STS and with Anderson's prescription in mind, an archaeology of what we have known and done about COVID-19, or what I would call the social and technical infrastructure of epidemics, is a prudent place to start. In "Triumph of the Default" (2009), the founding editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, revealed why knowing the default setting is crucial when taking any action:

By definition a default works when we—the user or consumer or citizen—do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that "no choice" is a choice itself. There is no neutral, even, or especially, in non-action.

As I write this, we have seen forms of the default setting in responses to the pandemic. Some of them are conventional and traditional, such as quarantine and isolation measures, and some are fundamental and new, such as sequencing this virus and giving it the formal, artificial name of COVID-19.

We have also learned of hidden infrastructures made visible by the disease. For example, only with the unexpected outbreak in Northern Italy did people realize the existence of the connection between Wenzhou, a Chinese city famous for its fabric industry, and the world fashion center of Milan. Such connections present us with a different topology of the world, one where frontiers provide little sense of population and commercial flows. We also have witnessed the collapse of production chains in medical products. Some consequences of such collapses are understandable, such as the scarcity of certain patented pharmaceuticals. Nonetheless, there also have been unpredicted consequences. Face masks, considered a low-end medical device that provides just basic protection, have suddenly became a crucial component in fighting the pandemic.

And beyond becoming aware of these infrastructures, we have noticed a compression of time when it comes to their changing. Everything just happens too quickly. We need far-reaching proposals, such as Bruno Latour's (2020) call for a thoroughly ecological analysis of the outbreak, treating it as a "dress rehearsal" for dealing with climate change—the coming...