ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Science and the State: A Global Story

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

It will come as no surprise that modern science and the modern state are inextricable. Twentieth-century American social scientific thinking has advanced the thesis that liberal democracy and modern science and technology go hand in hand, and yet contemporary and historical counterexamples belie such a presumption. This panel explores the variegated ways in which science and the state have been intertwined and co-emergent in the long 20th century. Drawing on cases from around the world, this roundtable will disaggregate the state as a unified actor and explore the implications of the state across time and space.

Bouk's contributions begin with thinking about one of the paradigmatic cases in the United States for linking science to liberal democracy, the census, to consider the interplay of politics and scientific expertise. Fu will consider how Chinese and Japanese scientific communities leveraged state spaces such as schools to define both the scientifically possible and the politically legitimate. Han will shift focus to consider the dynamics of transnational scientific competition generated by the American Central Asiatic Expeditions (1921-1930) and the Chinese academic institutions. Lawson will explore the formation of Lebanon's "agnopolitical state" in the 1950s, meaning a state organized around laissez-faire institutions that intentionally curtailed the development of the state's own scientific and research capacities. Wu will examine the tensions implicit in meteorological institutions in Asia—between their founding as imperial infrastructure and subsequent integration with national scientific aims. Finally, Moore will discuss popular science culture in China and Japan, including science fiction and technocratic fantasies about the future.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Chair

• Nadin Heé, Universität Leipzig

Participants

• Qi Han, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

• Aaron Moore, University of Edinburgh

• Owain Lawson, Oberlin College

• Dan Bouk, Colgate University

Session Organizers

• Jia-Chen Fu, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica

• Shellen Wu, Lehigh University