Inter-area/Border Crossing

E025: Technologies of Everyday Life Part 1: Insights from a Collaborative Research Project on the Making of Modern East Asia

Organizer(s)

• AL

  Angela Leung

  Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
  University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Chair(s)

• AL

  Angela Leung

  Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
  University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Discussant(s)

• IN

  Izumi Nakayama

  Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
  University of Hong Kong, United States
• MH

  Max Hirsh

  Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
  University of Hong Kong, United States
• SG

  Suzanne Gottschang

  Anthropology
  Smith College, United States
• WK

  Wen-Hua Kuo

  Institute of Public Health
  National Yang-Ming University, United States

In 2017, an interdisciplinary team of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, STS and urban scholars came together at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Hong Kong to launch a collaborative research project that studies the role of everyday technologies in the making of modern East Asia from the 19^thcentury to the present. Drawing inspiration from the history and anthropology of technology, East Asian STS studies, and urban studies, the team has spent the past two years conducting research on a variety of what we deem everyday technologies—ranging from food and medicine to telephones, automation, and transportation—with two goals in mind:

• First, we seek to take the perspective of technological change to reframe the notion of East Asia as a region. In so doing, we highlight regional connections by tracing the movements of people, ideas, practices, and materials to eschew a rigid sense of boundedness of the region (Tagliacozzo, Siu and Perdue 2015-2019; Anderson 2018; Duara 2010, 2018; Smith 2019).


• Second, our project aims to illuminate the relationship between technology and modernity by foregrounding specific examples of technological innovations that have produced profound and lasting shifts in the everyday lives of people living in East Asia (Lefebvre 1958; Highmore 2002).


•  To achieve these ends, our interdisciplinary team—made up of scholars based throughout East Asia, as well as in Europe, North America, and Australia—goes beyond the traditional frameworks of national, colonial and post-colonial histories that have been conveniently used to explain West-East technological transfer and Asian aspirations for modernity. Moving beyond conventional geopolitical frameworks, we deploy the concept of infrastructure (Larkin 2013) in order to open up new ways of interpreting the manifold local, transnational and trans-regional technological engagements that have made East Asian societies what they are today.

Five collaborators will discuss the preliminary findings of their respective projects to illustrate the strengths and opportunities of this collaborative undertaking as well as the cross-disciplinary and methodological challenges that they encountered along the way.

*Hong Kong RGC Collaborative Research Fund Scheme, "Making Modernity in East Asia: Technologies of Everyday Life, 19th-21st Centuries" (CRF C7011-16G).