This issue sees out 2019, the first year of EASTS’s inclusion in the Arts and Humanities and Social Science Citation Index within Web of Science. While viewing the data in the Journal Citation Reports released earlier this year, I could not help but imagine a ship named EASTS sailing into a boundless ocean of publications. In this ocean, articles, like waves, keep moving and spreading. They converge and diverge on topics, methods, even world views, creating a complicated—and almost overwhelming—mosaic. Where are we? What does East Asia mean in STS studies? Although we have been concerned with these questions since the inception of EASTS, it all becomes more real when accompanied by numbers, graphs, and diagrams.
One attempt to answer such questions can be seen in Wen-yuan Lin and John Law’s recent article “Where Is East Asia in STS?” (2019). Taking Taiwan as an example, Lin and Law provide a conceptual framework to showcase the multiplicity of East Asian STS and to accommodate the related literature of the past two decades. “Region” as a research topic and a spatial metaphor of knowledge can, in their view, be productive. As they state, “On the one hand, we ask how scholars conceptualize the location of East Asian technoscience in the world. And on the other, a related question, we consider how they imagine the location of East Asian STS in relation to other forms of STS” (115).
