Abstract
During the opening panel at the recent Society for the Social Studies ofScience/Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnologia (4S/ESOCITE) meeting in Buenos Aires, the 4S president (and editor of this journal), Gary Downey, challenged us to move beyond the traditional linear model of knowledge creation and utilization by reflecting on how many Science and Technology Studies scholars pursue novel ways of acting upon the world through scaling up their scholarship. This critical participation piece describes our attempt to forge an international research forum in the wake of the 2011 East Japan Disaster that constitutes one such attempt to produce scalable scholarship. Inspired by the deep reflexivity of autoethnography, this account examines the tensions inherent to such an endeavor, including the tensions between scholarship and engagement; personal and professional goals; research ethics and different international standards for scholarship; and the desire to make engineering visible versus the dominant STS (science and technology studies) framing of disasters research. This account should serve as a useful guide for others seeking to build international collaborations involving engineering studies, and other similar efforts to produce scalable scholarship.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 191-209 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Engineering Studies |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2 2014 |
Funding
I have to admit that at this point our work was animated by no small measure of what one might call academic imperialism. I can honestly say that our primary concern lay with the victims of the disaster and the continuing recovery and containment operations there. We too remained mesmerized by the disaster and its continuing ramifications, and it was, and remains our belief that the disaster scholarship in and beyond STS can help mitigate and prevent the adverse consequences of disaster. It may help communities, officials, and knowing engineers avoid patterns of conduct that are known to be ineffective, or known to produce problems down the line. Our secondary concern lay with advancing disaster scholarship – what as scholars we tend to do best, or at least do most easily. Still, as reflected in both our internal seed grant proposal and our National Science Foundation (NSF) proposal, we also viewed this as an opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of US and European STS and engineering studies scholarship, and to help cultivate and strengthen relevant scholarship in Japan. In fairness (if not exactly in our defense), this is a concern we also hear from many of our Japanese colleagues – especially those trained outside of Japan. 4S held its first meeting in Asia a year earlier under just such a premise: despite the false fear of a significant drop in attendance, 4S decided to hold its 2010 annual meeting in Tokyo in order to encourage the further development of STS scholarship in Asia. (It turns out Tokyo was the third largest meeting to date for 4S.) SHOT is currently having very similar conversations about its 2016 meeting in Singapore. We would discover the problems with this position only in the course of our effort to create the STS Forum on the East Japan Disaster. Because of my lack of any prior background in disaster studies, Anto Mohsin from Cornell was kind enough to assist me with the preparation of an early version of this manuscript that was written up as a workshop report. While I have benefited from his knowledge and suggestions, the personal reading of the events described here are that of the first author. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-1230627.
Keywords
- East Japan Disaster
- alternative conference formats
- blogs
- disaster STS
- disaster studies
- international collaboration
- invisible engineer
- making and doing
- new media
- research ethics
- scalable scholarship
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- General Engineering
- History and Philosophy of Science