ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Illegible Knowledge and Illicit Wells: Groundwater Infrastructure in Taiwanese Aquaculture’s Resource Frontier

• In Event: Wells, Labs, and Corridors: Situated Infrastructures and the Production of Scientific Knowledge

English Abstract

This paper examines how local knowledge of the subterranean was produced, monopolized, and materially implemented in Taiwan’s coastal aquaculture frontier. In southern Taiwan, groundwater wells became crucial infrastructure for aquaculture expansion, while their overuse led to land subsidence that drew regulatory attention. Prior studies have focused on industrial development or subsidence mitigation, yet rarely consider groundwater wells as critical infrastructure—both enabling aquaculture and contributing to environmental degradation.
This paper asks how wells developed by local actors became excrescent infrastructures: publicly disavowed by the state yet too vital to dismantle. Given the invisibility of groundwater, well drilling depended not only on technicians’ embodied tacit knowledge but also on the monopolization of small-scale geological knowledge within kin-like hometown networks. These wells were built not through formal geological surveys but through localized, experiential knowledge of the subsurface—illegible to and deemed irrelevant by state geoscientific expertise.
I argue that well drilling entangled environmental, bodily, and social relationships. In doing so, the paper foregrounds the infrastructural agency of non-state actors and contributes to debates in history of science and STS about how subterranean knowledge is built, maintained, and contested.

Author

• Chun-Yi Ho, Academia Sinica