Daiwie Fu’s 2019 work A Genealogical History of STS and Its Multiple Constructions: To Weave an Extensive Network for Gazing upon the Modern Sciences can be regarded as an essential contribution to the development of STS in East Asia. The book’s focus is mainly the construction of SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge) in the period from the early 1970s to the middle of the 1980s. At that time, SSK was on the rise in England as the mainstream of STS (Science and Technology Studies). Inspired by his own experience of transforming academic interests from Thomas Kuhn and the philosophy of science to STS, the author started to question the intellectual relationship between Kuhn and SSK: when so many STS people were praising Kuhn and his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, how should we understand Kuhn’s conservative attitude toward SSK and his later research, which diverged so far from it? Based on this question, the author carefully examined the early history of SSK and its interaction with other disciplines, such as philosophy, social anthropology, and history of science. How these three paths became entwined with one another is also a big concern for this book. As one of the pioneers and promoters of the development of STS in Taiwan and Asia, Fu addresses different aspects of SSK’s political involvement, connected as it is to the practice of STS in Taiwan. This book remedies the neglect of the early history of STS in Taiwanese academia and will stoke interest in the interpretation of scientific knowledge and the understanding of SSK’s various emergences, as Fu emphasized in his latest article, “the unsettled social and academic struggles in contexts, and the unstable multiple constructions in different moments” (Fu 2020a).
