Science and Society in Global Asian Workshop

What can knowledge of connected histories of Asia offer the field of science and technology studies (STS)? How might studying the various exchanges and mutually constitutive encounters between local knowledge and modern science/medicine--or between competing views of one or the other--contribute to conceptual and empirical development of STS? How do such encounters push us to rethink the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, the modern and the traditional, and the scientific and “unscientific”? This workshop will further the ongoing debate on decentering STS from Western contexts by inviting a group of researchers to explore the globalizing, heterogeneous, syncretic, and plural facets of connected histories of science and society across Asia. Building on a wide range of recent scholarship in the history of science and medicine, this workshop seeks new conceptual vocabularies that neither fully universalize nor fully provincialize the experiences of “East” or “West.”