Climbing Conflicting Knowledge Infrastructures: Engineers without Taiwan, 1925-1950

• In Event: Infrastructure, Worlding and Knowledge

Abstract

This paper examines the normative commitments of two knowledge infrastructures by following people who tried to climb up through them - Taiwanese engineers. We describe movement through infrastructures as challenges to add "directionalities" - valenced pathways of travel that include knowledge, identities, and commitments. And sometimes they include dead ends. Taiwanese engineers thought they would be freed from the barriers of a Japanese knowledge hierarchy when the Empire of Japan handed Taiwan over to the Republic of China in 1945 - the Retrocession. Many would-be engineers had worked for decades to climb the Japanese infrastructures of industrial education and work that largely prevented Taiwanese boys and men from pursuing careers as anything more than low-level workers. Acceding to positions as managers or small business owners required strategic moves, considerable persistence, and good fortune. However, arriving Chinese engineers had themselves risen through contrasting infrastructures that challenged them to learn science, become scientists, and value scientific progress. Taiwanese engineers tried to adapt by quickly creating infrastructures that certified them as knowledgeable professionals. But the engineers were overwhelmed by the massive re-settlement of technical workers and the associated infrastructures of education and work that came with them. After fifty years of subordination within Japan, a new subordination within China made it impossible for engineers born on the island to embrace Taiwan as a normative outcome. At least for a while.

Authors

• Kuo-Hui Chang, National Taiwan University

• Gary Downey, Virginia Tech

• Po-Jen Bono Shih, Virginia Tech