ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contested Cosmologies: Knowledge Hybridity and Epistemic Disobedience in China’s Space Station Program

• In Event: Science and Technology in Post-1949 China

English Abstract

Contested Cosmologies: Knowledge Hybridity and Epistemic Disobedience in China’s Space Station Program
This paper examines China’s space station program as a compelling instance of “plural scientific worlds,” contesting linear narratives of technological progress. Moving beyond the image of a seamless national achievement, it reveals a historically stratified process characterized by the hybridization of Soviet-era legacies, indigenous engineering heuristics, and innovative “work-around” solutions born from international isolation.
Drawing on archival materials, technical reports, and oral histories, the study demonstrates how the station’s design emerged from continual negotiation among divergent institutional cultures, competing political visions, and evolving technical constraints within China’ aerospace system. These multifaceted negotiations—spanning modular architecture, long-duration human missions, and risk governance—reflect a dynamic engineering milieu where consensus was neither automatic nor uniform.
The analysis highlights acts of epistemic disobedience by often-overlooked actors, including systems architects, mid-career engineers, and women specialists. Their critical interventions challenged entrenched assumptions, ultimately reshaping core design principles and risk management protocols. This illustrates how internal dissent functions as a generative source of epistemic plurality rather than mere resistance to scientific consensus.
In reframing the program’s history as a form of “negotiated science,” this study situates its development at the intersection of global techno-politics, heterogeneous engineering traditions, and plural knowledge systems. It thereby offers a critical, non-Western perspective that contributes to more inclusive, relational, and plural histories of outer space.

Author

• Jingjin WANG, Beihang University