Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Joppan George, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

The scientific understanding of and the technological intervention in the environment have critically shaped and transformed human interaction with non-human nature in Asia. Humanities and social science scholars work through science and technology studies (STS)—a loosely defined interdisciplinary field that examines science and technology in relation to social, cultural, and political dynamics—to explore the intricate nuances of our commingling with and in the environment. The application of STS lens has enriched the critical examination of human engagement with the more-than-human environment in Asia, articulating issues such as the climate crisis, infrastructure building, and multi-species relations among many others. While STS has enabled Asianists to adopt novel scholarly approaches, proactive conversations among engaged researchers have often been limited in scope due to disciplinary boundaries. With speakers drawn from a variety of institutional and scholarly backgrounds, this roundtable intends to promote an interdisciplinary discussion on the challenges and opportunities in crafting narratives and critical analyses of Asian Environmental STS. The roundtable will raise and attempt to answer a few pertinent questions concerning the manifestations of the Anthropocene in contemporary Asia, its historical antecedents, and the critical currency of the concept of Anthroposupremocene for the unfolding future.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Buhm Soon Park is Professor at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy and Director of the Center for Anthropocene Studies at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Trained in the historian of science at the Johns Hopkins University, he spent postdoctoral years at the US National Institutes of Health. His research explores policy issues at the intersection between science, law, and governance from the historical and comparative perspective. He currently works on the co-evolution of Cold War militarism, developmentalism, and ecological thinking in East Asia, examining the multi-species entanglement in the DMZ and the rice paddy field.

Maya Kóvskaya (PhD UC Berkeley, 2009) is Founder and Head of the AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab and teaches Multispecies Anthropocene Studies and Theory at Chiang Mai University. They have published widely on the intersection of the political, linguistic, and ecological with performative, semiotic, and visual culture. Their ecophilosophical and multispecies ethnographic work elaborates what they call the “Anthroposupremocene,” as well as “feral agency,” “more-than-human speech acts,” “multispecies language games,” “eco-performativity,” and forms of eco-semiosis, to investigate the extralinguistic ways that nature “speaks” to rethink the human in a more-than-human world, conceptualize a politics beyond the human, and imagine “multispecies polities” as shared sites of symbiopoiesis—symbiotic shared world-making practices against the Anthropocene.

Devika Shankar is a historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. Her research interests primarily lie in environmental history, legal history and science and technology studies. She is currently completing her book manuscript titled An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development in South Asia which focuses on the port of Kochi in south western India and its transformation in the 20th century. She has also published articles on the history of water laws, princely sovereignty and land acquisition in the South Asian context.

Seohyun Park is a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is working at the nexus of science and technology studies, environmental history, and East Asian studies. Broadly his research explores engineering practices that shape human interaction with the natural environment in modern Korea and broader Asia. He is currently working on his book manuscript tentatively titled Dammed Nation: Engineering the Han River for Modern South Korea. He received his PhD from the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.