The title, Kyongju Things, Assembling Places, signals two subjects of interest for EASTS: conflicts over the legacies of the ancient capital of Silla versus development (especially the routing of the high-speed train pictured on the cover); and a strategy of narration, the actor network theory (ANT) of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour.
The virtue of ANT is its double focus on (1) the active work that goes into the reproduction of power relations, networks, obligatory points of passage for authoritative information collection, processing, and dissemination; and (2) the ways in which matters of fact (technological calculations for instance) become matters of concern, and the ways “matters of fact” in turn are deconstructed by the contestation of social actors with differential interests into elements that can be reconfigured in new ways.
