A note on this review: starting with the invitation for a conventional book review, Xiaowei Huang, the author who panned this essay, with the consideration of our readership, kindly offered his additional local observations in the scope of his discussion. As a result, an editorial decision was made to allow this essay to be published as such despite its length exceeding that of standard EASTS book reviews. We uphold this piece to be of merit and significance, and hope our readers can feel the same pleasure we did while reading it.
-EASTS Editorial Office
In the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, Sheila Jasanoff views Science and Technology Studies (STS) as "a field of its own" (Jasanoff 2010). Before that, she had already co-edited The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (second edition, 1995) and the section on STS in The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (first edition, 2001). To East Asian scholars, Jasanoff herself is generally recognized as an interdisciplinary scholar on STS. To be more specific, according to her various works translated into Chinese, there are three major sub-fields of STS. (a) Science Communication. The Handbook of STS mentioned above was included in the Peking University Collections of Science Communication in 2004; (b) Science, Technology, and Public Policy. Both The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (1990) and Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (2005) were translated into Chinese in 2011, as part of the Scientification of Decision-making book series; and (c) Ethics of Engineering and Technology. The book on this particular sub-field, The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future (2016), one of the Norton Global Ethics Series, was widely read after its publication in Chinese in 2018. The main translator of both this book and Designs on Nature is Shang Zhicong (119 ), who teaches STS at the University of Chinese Academy of...
