ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The history of science has often emphasized discovery, formal institutions, and intellectual breakthroughs, and the history of technology has highlighted major feats of construction and innovation. Yet both fields have tended to treat infrastructure as a stable, inert backdrop to scientific work. This session complicates that assumption by examining how infrastructure, in its ongoing states of contingency, maintenance, and repair, operates as an epistemological agent that shapes scientific practice and the formation of knowledge.
By tracing the histories embedded in infrastructures, we show that scientific knowledge rests on unstable material foundations sustained through everyday labor. Across three case studies from East Asia, we approach infrastructure not simply as a physical substrate but as a topography of knowledge—a terrain where authority is negotiated, expertise is situated, and scientific worlds are materially composed.
The papers examine distinct infrastructural environments that reveal forms of scientific work unfolding beyond formal institutional boundaries:
1. Excrescent Infrastructure: Illicit yet indispensable groundwater wells supporting Taiwan’s aquaculture economy.
2. Interactional Infrastructure: The material negotiations and continual reconstruction that shape the contemporary laboratory.
3. Ecological Infrastructure: Urban ecological corridors sustained through civic expertise, seasonal monitoring, and multispecies interactions.
Together, these studies show how the history of knowledge is shaped by embodied skills, informal networks, and the often-invisible labor of upkeep. Ultimately, this session proposes a renewed approach to the history of science that integrates the history of maintenance into epistemology—reassessing the contingencies of scientific truth and foregrounding the contributions of non-state and marginal actors.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Kuang-Chi Hung, National Taiwan University

Commentator

• Jung Lee, Ewha Womans University

Individual Presentations

• Illegible Knowledge and Illicit Wells: Groundwater Infrastructure in Taiwanese Aquaculture’s Resource Frontier - Chun-Yi Ho, Academia Sinica

• How Does an Inscription Device Take Its Place? : Tracing the Ongoing Construction of Laboratory Infrastructure - Yeonwha Kim, Seoul National University

• Ecological Corridors as Situated Infrastructure: Civic Expertise and the Making of Environmental Knowledge in Suwon, South Korea - MinHwa Yun, Ewha Womans University

Session Organizers

• Yeonwha Kim, Seoul National University

• MinHwa Yun, Ewha Womans University