Crises and Entanglements
Science, Technology and Medicine in East Asia
The multiple
crises besetting the contemporary world call for decisive interventions by
historical research, including studies on the history of East Asian science,
technology, and medicine. “Whiggish" ideas about the history of science
have long been discarded and phantasies about an “end of history" have
been laid to rest. Instead, recent studies have highlighted the entangled
nature of the histories of science, technology, and medicine; identified the
diverse actors involved in their production and circulation; and explored the
multiple scales in which epistemic practices need to be situated. While opening
up exciting and fruitful vistas, even these new approaches have rarely tried to
expand our field to include a framework that systematically acknowledges the
existence and persistence of crises that seem to threaten humanity's
survival.
Problems
that may be addressed through such a framework begin with questioning to what
extent science and technology have contributed to bringing about or
intensifying such crises and extend to hopes and expectations that science,
technology, and medicine may help to overcome them. No less important is the
question of the role of entanglements in times of crises: how resilient is
scientific and technological cooperation and how reliable are networks through
which knowledge is generated and preserved?
If crises
are conceptualized as being accompanied by major disruptions of social life,
the question of how science, technology, and medicine operate under such
conditions becomes a crucial problem. In fact, geographical, temporal,
disciplinary, and intellectual entanglements have often played important roles
in mitigating or overcoming crises. In this effort, maintaining cooperation and
contact among scientific communities, probing historical precedents, and
“thinking and acting outside the box" have been of great importance. Even
if these responses within scientific communities could not solve crises by
themselves, they were often able to suggest or pave the ways out of them. This
conference encourages contributions related to this theme and aims to identify
new approaches in the history of science, technology and medicine in East Asia
that do justice to the challenges of our age.
