International research collaborations (IRCs) are widely considered central to addressing environmental sustainability challenges. Historic, economic, social, and cultural inequalities, however, create global geopolitical hegemonies in which institutional, funding, and governance power is concentrated in more economically advantaged regions including Europe. These inequalities create asymmetrical epistemic authority in IRCs, mirroring centres and peripheries of science-making, as described by Science and Technology Studies (STS). Forest research is shaped by these inequalities yet requires sustainable socioenvironmental solutions. Although STS offers tools to examine how asymmetries shape knowledge-making in science, it has rarely explored how this emerges in everyday practices of sub-Saharan African (SSA)–West European forest IRCs, despite the significance of forests in SSA and documented pervasive inequalities between the two regions. I trace knowledge-making processes of five forest sustainability IRCs through a positioning analysis of meetings and fieldwork, complemented by interviews, showing how, and from where, collaborators shape ways of doing and knowing. European collaborators disproportionately shaped approaches while SSA collaborators adapted to European practices. Supporting conditions including fieldwork expertise and disproportionate persistence helped SSA approaches to be taken up, whereas European approaches operated as the default mode. SSA collaborators shaped practices outside meeting spaces less visibly and faced barriers to equal participation due to sociocultural and material factors, with SSA women encountering layered gender and geography inequalities. Insights show how daily knowledge-making processes recreate and counter power asymmetries, encouraging reflection and practical action on how IRCs can address inequalities.
This article examines the transnationalization of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), analyzing its evolution from a predominantly North American and Eurocentric organization to a more globally inclusive scholarly community. Drawing on data from governance structures, conference participation, scholarly recognition, and editorial work, the study highlights key trends and challenges in 4S’s efforts to diversify its membership and perspectives. Findings reveal gradual progress, such as increased representation from Latin America, East Asia, and Oceania in conferences and governance, alongside persistent disparities in prestigious awards like the Bernal Prize, which remains dominated by Euro-American scholars. The article underscores the tension between 4S’s foundational Euro-American identity and its aspirations for epistemic diversity, particularly in light of critiques from postcolonial and feminist STS scholars. By exploring how 4S scaffolds transnationalization – through multilingual conferences, regional collaborations, and editorial policies – the study argues that these efforts are crucial for fostering a more diverse and globally engaged STS field. The analysis concludes that while 4S has made strides in broadening participation, there is still a long road ahead to enrich STS scholarship and to fully accomplish the global scope of the Society’s mission.
Retooling is a ubiquitous practice that mobilizes innovation, maintenance, and repair to address sociotechnical change in times when transformations seem difficult to accomplish. Retooling entails an intentional reorientation of purpose, foregrounds the nonlinear trajectories of technological and scientific shifts, and focuses our attention on the meso level of organizational and collective life. This paper offers a theorization of retooling grounded in two case studies: one about water reuse technologies in the United States and the other about efforts to refashion the sugarcane industry in Brazil. We suggest that retooling is a useful analytic tool at a time when both innovation and maintenance seem not only difficult to differentiate but also insufficient for explaining sociotechnical change on their own. Furthermore, during turbulent times when change seems difficult to accomplish, retooling offers a capacious conceptualization that highlights the political orientations that inspire all sociotechnical transformations and the possibilities that emerge from mobilizing what-is to bring about what-should-be.
In this final editorial for the 2020–2025 Editorial Collective, we reflect on how we have worked to action on our key editorial commitments, which included: cultivating greater transnationalization in the field, deepening open access infrastructures, foregrounding pedagogies as a vital domain of STS scholarship and practice, and engaging audiences beyond STS. We share how editing Engaging Science, Technology, and Society has foregrounded different dimensions, namely of community, infrastructure, and labor, in the context of running a scholar-led and -run journal like ESTS. Understanding the journal in this way, we suggest, surfaces both the difference-and promise-of a diamond open access journal like ESTS.
Carbon sequestration is a relatively recent phrase that refers to a broad suite of technologies meant to minimize the amount of carbon emitted to the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many scientific organizations have recently emphasized that carbon capture is a necessary part of attaining net-zero or negative carbon budgets. It has also become a particularly controversial set of technologies, funding streams, economic proposals, and imaginations of energy justice in place. However, we—during our joint work as social scientists on the justice dimensions of one specific carbon sequestration feasibility study—have found that the dominating arguments for and against carbon capture erase the fact of its multiplicity. From our situated location, it seems an urgent time to ask, within a larger industrial decarbonization agenda, what are the specificities of carbon capture and storage and how might we (the collective ‘we’ of engaged researchers and thinkers with interests in science & technology or environmental and climate engineering) address them? In this Engagement, we sketch some of the ways in which STS brings important insights to the growing literature on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and, at the same time, what new directions carbon sequestration agendas might require of STS scholarship.
What does “openness” mean when it comes to crafting digital tools and infrastructures for housing justice action research? This question is particularly urgent as global internet companies unleash new geospatial technologies to track and surveil. In this article, we examine the corporate software dependencies and organizational practices that the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) have encountered in its counter-mapping work. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects for counter-cartography have been developed to support both social research and housing justice work, but little collaboration between FOSS developers, critical cartographers, and community organizers has been fostered and sustained to date. In order to address this critical gap, we analyze project documentation alongside software development practices to discuss AEMP members’ experiences in developing open technologies for the “Covid-19 Housing Map.” We elaborate on the distinction between “political software” and “software politics” as an analytic device to describe contrasting modes of engagement with digital design. We demonstrate that FOSS adoption is not a simple matter of technological choice, but rather a complex sociotechnical process that fundamentally alters technopolitical relations and forms of political action. For the conclusion, we reflect on the broader implications of the technopolitical challenges that AEMP encountered, while also examining possibilities for creating and supporting “political software” aligned with the goals of housing action research.
In this engagement, I explore two ways to appreciate entangled areas in Southeast Asia through the urban, influenced by relational orientations to spatiality drawn from work in science and technology studies, assemblage urbanism and worlding cities. First, I survey how scholarship on Asian and Southeast Asian urbanisms have long reproduced but have also recently challenged the enduring territorial legacies of area thinking, moving from a view of stable, territorially-bound categories of space as basis for comparative analysis to one of movements, fluidity and interconnections. These shifts carry potentials for developing conceptual vectors oriented towards the coming together of socio-material contingencies that constitute urban areas. Second, I show how the periphery—a key spatial category that pertains to a specific urban site—may be examined as an effect of assemblage. A focus on emergence, contingency and undecidable trajectories destabilizes the fixity of spatial categories as basis for understanding urban areas. I demonstrate how an approach to entangled areas and their material itineraries highlights a multitude of practices, encounters, and co-existence that results in non-predetermined spatial outcomes. Such an approach to urban areas in/of Southeast Asia presents a different starting point for making areal comparisons while being more attuned to the multiple and generative possibilities in space.
The following editorial reflects on the thematic collection Entangled Areas: Reactivating Southeast Asia in the Anthropocene carefully curated by the collection’s editors—Casper Bruun Jensen and Fadjar Thufail. Twenty authors write across twelve Engagements including a preface by the thematic collection editors to consider area as an entangled with perspectives from Southeast Asia. In addition to this thematic collection we also present the original research article of Matthias Leese entitled “Adding Government to Proof.”
Since the turn of the millennium, the Anthropocene has heralded a series of wide-ranging transformations in the social sciences. Today, environmental humanities, new materialism actor-network theory, multi-species and more-than-human anthropologies, and critical zones all share interest earthly entanglements. In Southeast Asia, many of the prominent entanglements are disastrous—ecological degradation, mega pollution, accelerating precarity, sinking cities. A growing body of literature examines entanglements of humans, plants, and animals in Asian areas. In dialogue with this literature, the present set of engagements explore the proposition that Anthropocene entanglements call for a deeper rethinking of the notion of area itself. We are at a moment where the STS analytics of entanglement can be used to reactivate Southeast Asian – and other – areas. Shaped in heterogeneous perceptual, conceptual, sensorial, and political registers, areas emerge in the following set of engagements as layered multiplicities, each with its own distinctive grip on reality. Our gambit is that the ways in which entanglements make areas becomes a critical issue for STS as we go deeper into the Anthropocene.
Against ecologically modernist calls for the building of floating cities in the name of climate-proofing littoral futures, and this work critically engages with travelling technopolitical dreams for building with or on water in rapidly submerging coastal landscapes. We ask how buoyancy serves as a metaphor and method with which to contemplate areas as relational entanglements of the urban-amphibious in archipelagic Southeast Asia(s), while drawing on exclusionary practices of municipal placemaking. Foregrounding both grandiose and small-scale projects in the globalist wet dreams of a floating infrastructural future, we illustrate how policymakers struggle to contend with their own narratives of an amphibious vernacular past, often through archipelagic riparian imaginaries that reinforce prevailing modernist terra-centric urban planning biases and readings of watery inundation.
While area studies scholars classically observe geographical connectedness, there is more on offer in science and technology studies to understand the entangled, yet complex social and earth systems; and how both realms are mediated by tsunami warning system technologies. This article aims at tracing knowledge and socio-technical flows of tsunamis exemplified in different imagined ‘areas’: tsunamis risk areas as red zone, tsunami modeling as trading zone, and tsunami warning center as high-tensions zone, situated in the vastly archipelagic and geologically active Indonesia. These three vignettes represent different ‘areas’ in different ways and meanings to different social groups, local and beyond local. More importantly, these different areas or zones are mutually interconnected, beyond geographical boundaries, through tsunamis. By approaching tsunamis as a metaphoric ‘method,’ it is argued that forms of human and non-human entanglements could be better analyzed, moving away from the narrative that tsunamis are merely a killing wave.
This paper is a manifesto of the durian. The durian creates a fellowship, which differentiates Southeast Asian people and their Others. The pungent odor and mushy taste delimit a form of topological belonging. The smell and the taste bring the experience of eating durian into an ontological world. From remote corners of Indonesia to the highland region of mainland Southeast Asia, the infrastructures, practices and experiences of smelling and eating durian are constitutive of a Southeast Asia, which is at once similar and very different from the one known to conventional area studies. This durian topology leads me to argue that multispecies turn in STS is an important embodied and tactile complement to the critique to area studies.
The engagement delves into the relationship between the emergence of economic geology as a modern science, geological materials, and their entanglements with Southeast Asia as an area. It asks if the geo can speak by foregrounding the role of geological materials and the geological knowledge of the British, Dutch, and American Empires in assembling the region. During the nineteenth century, the Dutch and British Empire assembled Borneo Island and other islands into a geo-colonial assemblage. In the course of World War II and the period of decolonization, the Japanese Empire and national movements challenged this geo-colonial assemblage. As the new Empire of the twentieth century, the US competed with the Japanese Empire in a geological War, while facing challenges from the new nation-states in the Cold War era. Eventually, the American Empire re-assembled Borneo’s geo-colonial formation into the new entanglement of Southeast Asian geological assemblage. This engagement provides insights into the geological development of the British, Dutch, and American Empires in Southeast Asia and how geological materials and knowledge, i.e., economic geology, are essential elements in rethinking the future of Southeast Asian studies.
This afterword meditates on the idea of Southeast Asia as a “region” which, despite its fuzziness and its lack of geographical unity and cultural identity, has been with us for decades. Despite valiant efforts, no justifications and qualifications of a regional identity has succeeded more than partially, and no solution has been without problems and limitations. Even so, as these engagements with “entangled areas” vividly show, Southeast Asia remains a useful intellectual device that defies essentialism (with the possible exception of durian!)
This engagement revisits Willem van Schendel’s (2002) and James C. Scott’s (2009) depiction of Zomia under Anthropocene conditions. Zomia is a vast area of 2.5 million square kilometers, where approximately 100 million minority people lives. Historically, these ethnic groups have relied on altitude and the friction of the terrain to escape the authority of modern states and remain ungoverned. Since the late-nineteenth century, however, the area has increasingly been enclosed by these states, which has led to greater control of the populace through different kinds of economic policies and biopolitical apparatuses. With reference to recent concerns with uncontrollable upland burning, massively extractive plantations, and regionwide material itineraries (Jensen 2021; Sangkhamanee 2021) of smog over the northern Thai provinces (PM 2.5 refers to particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller. They are a significant concern in the context of air pollution due to their ability to penetrate deep into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream). I offer a perspective on one remote part of Southeast Asia, which considers it as a critical zone where many entanglements together redefine the ontological composition and cross-boundary effects of the area. This Anthropocene anarchism does not quite match Scott’s (2009, 7) Zomian image of human-centered ungovernability of ethnic groups, and state inability to govern such ‘shatter zones.’ Rather, as a consequence of Plantationocene (Barua, Martín, and Achtnich 2023; Chao 2022a) and Capitalocene (Haraway 2015, 2016; Moore 2016, 2017) entanglements, fine dust particles embark on material itineraries that transform the area and produce effects from the plantations and all the way back to the state-centers. In this manner, atmospheric Zomia traces new ecological lines between state territoriality, capitalism, and life on the fringes of Southeast Asia (Cassaniti 2022).
This paper engages how crime analysts turn “ill-structured” reports into “good,” analyzable data. Based on qualitative field research in a police department, the empirical analysis retraces the manual labor that is necessary to navigate the conflicting informational requirements of the criminal justice system and aggregate analytics. Building on Desrosières’ concept of the duality of data as both “proof” and “government,” the paper explicates how, vis-à-vis the limits of standardization in police reporting, analysts revert to forms of data proliferation to create (temporary) governmental functions while leaving the original structure and proof function of reports, as required by the logics of the criminal justice system, intact. In explicating this work, the paper contributes to debates in STS and criminology by foregrounding the role of manual labor in reconciling different knowledge and communication logics that characterize the tensions between proof and government.
National borders have typically defined Southeast Asia, a place long known for its extreme heterogeneity and historical global linkages. These presumably stable borders and their attendant coastlines fail to analytically capture the multispecies and material entanglements of history, policy, and national developmentalism currently reshaping landscapes within the region itself. The Anthropocene urges us to reconceptualize the region in a way that attends to critical ecological concerns for which the once fixed, geo-militarized formation of the region is proving irrelevant. At the core of our analysis are Southeast Asian coastlines and the sediments that comprise, create, and change them. In this collaboratively written paper, the authors provide a “sedimentary rethinking” of Southeast Asia. Sediments are actively remaking coastal zones in the region, shifting biotic and microscopic borders with often dangerous consequences. Over four micro-case studies, the writers offer snapshots of nickel mining and land reclamation in South Sulawesi, a rubble causeway across the Johor Straits, sediment isolation in Timor, and vertical sediment compaction on Jakartan coasts. Brought together, they offer new material and a scale of analysis that demonstrate the flimsy nature of colonial-era and state-based projects and the ongoing emergence of “area” under the disastrous accelerant of the Anthropocene.
Like zoonotic diseases which have captured the world’s attention—including SARS diseases, such as Covid-19—drug resistant malaria is widely viewed as a threat emerging in Asia. This essay explores how scientists and policy makers act within this discourse, which shapes their work and the allocation of scarce health resources in Cambodia. Questions about the ethics and politics of science come to the fore when the Greater Mekong subregion is an experimental site of elimination for other places where malaria is endemic. It demands innovative ways of doing “region,” following scientists’ conceptions of the “Greater Mekong subregion,” but also centering how borderlands are unique and important areas for the development of resistance. Africa-Southeast Asia relations are center stage, too, producing, I suggest, a region that is not geographically contiguous yet entangled through research, parasites, postcolonial conflict, and the biographies of scientists and health professionals.
Popular territories is an increasingly favored designation of urban spaces designed and developed by an amalgam of poor, working, and lower-middle classes reflecting an intersection of home-grown practices and political sensibilities. While such territories appear increasingly riven by authoritarian populisms, religious conservatism and a systemic undermining of the economic relations that once supported intensive collaboration, they remain a locus through which new institutional arrangements are prefigured. From Brazil to Indonesia to Nigeria, they facilitate the gestation of new economic and political solidarities; where forms of affiliation and cooperation take shape, where statuses, identities, and functions are aligned in ways that do not necessarily line up with a conventional sense of neighborhoods or communities. This article examines the ways in which particular conceptions of Blackness might be mobilized to highlight how the entanglements of perspective, circulatory trajectories, and ways of life shape such territories. Blackness has long been appropriated as a mechanism of decanting, de-selection, and extraction, deployed to particularize specific territories and populations as objects of disposal, surplus or exoticization. The singularities of popular territories thus emanate from a constant tension between the generativity of their own self-produced histories and their enforced vulnerabilities to expropriations beyond their control. Blackness operates as a methodological lens suited to apprehend such “ontologies” in their doubleness.
This “engagement” rethinks “area” as a set of multispecies entanglements linking humans, cattle, chemicals, and cultural tastes across borders rather than as a fixed geographic or political space. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork along the Myanmar–Thailand frontier between 2021 and 2023, the article traces the journey of retired oxen from Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone through Thailand’s feedlots to Chinese hotpot tables. Rather than a bounded geopolitical space, “area” emerges as an entangled process shaped by metabolism, pharmaceutical interventions, and a chain of care and transformation that connects borderlands via commodity chains to consumers. These interconnected practices—of feeding, medicating, transporting, and consuming—reveal how areas are continuously made and unmade through human and non-human entanglements.
