(Re)Thinking Mobilities and Chinese STS:" The Politics, Practices, and Cultural Logics of Diasporic Chinese Scientists in Technosciences, 1919–2018

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

Our panel encompasses papers about diasporic Chinese in the technosciences from 1919-2018. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary work and projects that emanate from gender, ethnic, and global studies, examining Chinese diasporic women scientists’ and engineers' careers, education, and webs of relationships. We also welcome papers that address the representations of Chinese scientists in media, art, and popular culture; and explore their professional identities, experiences, and solidarities. Focusing on the period 1919-2018 is a challenge to rethink the mobilities of Chinese technoscientists across a spectrum of historical, political, and cultural pasts and presents without assuming conventional periodizations. We seek papers that undertake topics historically, as well as in contemporary times; and call for projects that use a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to queries like these:

•  How are notions of modernity, scientific progress, and intellectualism reimaged through diasporic Chinese technoscientists, their international careers, and TRANSnational Chinese STS?  
•  How do dispersed communities of Chinese technoscientists disrupt current debates about cosmopolitism, internationalism, nationalism, globalizations, diasporas, transnational migration, and indigeneity? 
•  How do Chinese scientists disrupt the ways we understand the unequal, varied, and complex practices of technosciences globally?
•  What are the innovative theoretical and methodological ways to investigate Chinese scientists’ continuing, strategic renegotiation of class, ethnic, gender, and minority status as they circulate translocally amid globalization?
•  How have diasporic Chinese scientists' interventions differed across the technosciences and STS genealogies?

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / (Re)Thinking Mobilities and Chinese STS: The Politics, Practices, and Cultural Logics of Diasporic Chinese Scientists in Technosciences, 1919-2018

Chair

• Diane Gu, UCLA

Discussant

• Roli Varma

Individual Presentations

• Transnational Mobilities of Expertise: Case Studies of Chinese Biomedical Scientists - Larry Au, Columbia University

• A Diasporic Travelogue of the Chinese Anti-Malaria Materia Medica' Yao' : 'Changshan' - Rey Calingo Tiquia, University of Melbourne

• Chinese Diaspora and Trans-national Science: Chao Yuen Ren and Cybernetics in Cold-War America - Chen-Pang Yeang, University of Toronto

• Chinese Dreams? American Dreams? Gendered Transnational Networks, Guanxi, and the Power of Reversed Migration - Diane Gu, UCLA

• The Revolt of Chinese “Red Engineers” ——from the Department of Technological Sciences of Chinese Academy of Sciences, to the Independent Chinese Academy of Engineering - Zhihui Zhang, Chinese Academy of Science

Session Organizer

• Diane Gu, UCLA