STS on the Street and at the Court: Interlocutors in the Taiwan RCA Collective Occupational Disease Lawsuit

• In Event: Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel - I

Abstract

The STS community in Taiwan has played a vital role in one of the longest, largest, and most science-intensive collective lawsuit to date. Starting in the late 1990s, the campaign of former electronics workers at the Taiwan plants of US-based Radio Corporation of America (RCA) for redressing health damages they suffer from exposure to toxic chemicals at the workplace during the company’s operation from 1970 to 1992. Legal action taken by the former employees with a myriads of volunteers from various social backgrounds finally resulted in a partial victory at the Supreme Court in 2018. As part of an effort to think about “STS making and doing,” this article tells the story from two STSers who have been working with the RCA workers’ campaign, and found their personal experience of scholarship/activism inextricably intertwined with the same social fabric of Taiwan’s history of rapid industrialization that had also led to the victimization of many people, including the RCA workers.

Authors

• Yi-Ping Lin, National Yang-Ming University

• Hsin-Hsing Chen, Shih-Hsin University Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies