These short essays are an experiment in quite how far EASTS’ cover images can take us. Affiliating STS with different disciplines, and working on opposite sides of the globe, we are delighted to have two EASTS editors—Hyungsub Choi, an excellent historian of technology working in Korea, and Leandro Rodriguez Medina, the former editor-in-chief of Mexico-based Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society—reflecting on their encounters with three EASTS covers that feature trains—an iconic presence of progress and modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Without knowing that Shigehisa Kuriyama's beautifully written “Covers and the Poetics of Communication” featured two of the three mentioned in his essay, Leandro chooses covers that resonate with his experiences in a railway-employee family in Argentina and tries to make sense of the cultural messages they carry for non-Europeans. Sharing Leandro's critical examination of these modern/Western machines, Hyungsub's reflection is a culturally-oriented one: “What do we mean by ‘East Asian technology’?” As his essay goes, Hyungsub's observation nicely echoes the promises of “Making Modernity in East Asia: Technologies of Everyday Life, 19th–21st Centuries” project, a Hong Kong based, transnational collaboration that aims to trace technological processes and modernity in this region, advancing “new methodological strategies into the study of technology and its knowledge, practice, and artifacts that define and redefine East Asia as a region with fluid boundaries” (Hirsh, Leung and Nakayama Citation2019: 507). As readers will see, the two essays here do not stand alone; instead, via the poetics of EASTS covers on how technology has made STS both modern and traditional, global and vernacular, ideological and practical, together they achieve a recondita armonia.—EASTS Editorial Office
Of all the beautiful covers that have graced EASTS, three in particular motivate this essay—those of volumes 11(2) in 2017, 9(3) in 2015, and 6(1) in 2012 (see Figures 1–3). All three feature trains. Perhaps because I come from a family of railway employees (my grandfather worked in Ferrocarriles Argentinos for many years, back in the 1940s and 1950s) or perhaps because of my interest in how this technology was called upon, in Argentine history, to unite the country and shape a nation, trains have always captured my attention and my imagination. They are, as Hyungsub Choi calls them, iconic machines. What makes me curious when thinking about trains is how, as soon as the word comes to my mind, it is always accompanied by another word, “progress.” Beyond their technical particularity, these machines favor certain representations, stimulate certain imaginaries and encourage certain lucubrations. In parts of the West, the “train of progress” is perhaps one of the most used metaphors in politics when talking about modernization processes based on science and technology.
