STS with East Asian Characteristics?

It remains difficult to describe the recent flourishing of STS in East Asia without ironic recourse to categories of actors, networks, and mobiles, whether immutable or mutable (Latour 1983, 1986; Star and Griesemer 1989). In particular, one can imagine Daiwie Fu, the founding editor of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, as a go-getting Taiwanese Louis Pasteur, enrolling and marshalling various agents, actors, and actants in order to realize and to mobilize a distinctive package called “East Asian STS”—operating not unlike the figures inventing “Traditional Chinese Medicine” in the last century, entrepreneurs whom Sean Hsiang-lin Lei (2014) depicts so vividly. A brief perusal of the tables of contents and lists of advisory editors of the journal since its first issue in 2007 reveals many of the actors who were tempted into the...