ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Landscapes of Development: Plural Visions and the Making of State-Building Infrastructures in East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel explores how material infrastructures in twentieth-century East Asia functioned not as neutral technological backbones of state-building, but as contested arenas where multiple actors advanced plural visions of modernity, progress, and justice. By tracing the intertwined histories of infrastructure construction at urban and regional peripheries in East Asia—including Seoul and the Yeonggwang region in South Korea, Yokosuka City in Japan, and Hainan Island in China—this panel examines how infrastructures served as central sites for producing institutions, power, and everyday life in the making of modern states. Yet the visions and practices that animated these projects were never fixed. Their planning, construction, and operation brought together state agencies, corporate actors, engineers, and local communities, each featuring competing visions of development. Highlighting this dynamic, the panel conceptualizes infrastructure as an open-ended and relational process in which shifting regulations, corporate finance, technical expertise, and local aspirations are continually assembled, negotiated, and reworked. The four case studies include: Jungha Hwang on the overlap between traditional night-soil collection and modern sewage in 1970s South Korea; Yeseul Park on a scientized contest among plural actors over Yeonggwang’s thermal-effluent disputes; Masahiro Inohana on the plural motivations behind Rikkyo University’s promotion of a nuclear research reactor; and Shiyi Xiang on PRC rubber plantations that mobilized scientists and workers to reshape the tropical frontier. Together, the panel demonstrates why infrastructures matter for the history of science: as key arenas where plural visions and knowledges of infrastructural development were produced, contested, and negotiated, thereby materializing the very landscapes of modern state-building. (This panel is sponsored by FHSAsia.)

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• John Kanbayashi, University of Pennsylvania

Commentator

• Eric Dinmore, Hampden-Sydney College

Individual Presentations

• At the Dawn of “Modern” Sewerage: The Uncanny Coexistence of New and Traditional Human Waste Management in 1970s Seoul - Jungha Hwang, UC Irvine

• Contesting Safety: Plural Visions of Risk in South Korea’s Nuclear Plant Thermal-Effluent Disputes, 1987-1995 - Yeseul Park, Seoul National University

• Plurality of Promoting Actors in the Installation of a Research Reactor: The Case of Rikkyo University’s Nuclear Research Institute in Yokosuka - Masahiro Inohana, SOKENDAI

• Shaping Tropical Frontiers: Construction of Rubber Farms in Hainan Island - Shiyi Xiang, Johns Hopkins University

Session Organizers

• Yeseul Park, Seoul National University

• Jungha Hwang, UC Irvine