• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.281-318
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• 2014

This paper aims to examine women's understanding of technoscience by analyzing girls' comics(少女漫畵, Sonyeo Manhwa). The idea that women were not interested in science was a socially accepted. But this paper reveals that women are interested in science in a different way by analyzing Korean SF girls' comics. By examining an image of science in SF girls' comics in comparison to SF boys' comics(少年漫畵, Sonyeon Manhwa), this paper shows that women look technoscience through 'reflexivity' focused on 'human' and that this special character is derived from the feature of women's culture. SF girls comics have two features. First, girls comics reflect on power made by technoscience rather than describe it elaborately. And the reflexivity is expressed through a mental state, an emotion, and relations between human beings focused on a human nature, an ego, and an identity. It is different from boys comics that give weight to the mechanics and that show simple plot such as utopia or distopia, or a battle of good versus evil. Second, girls comics express technoscience as daily practices. In girls comics, some technosciences are linked to our daily lives and cartoonists and readers consider an 'essence of knowledge' together. It is different from men's view that regards knowledge as power or means.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.461-477
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• 2010

Recent environmental issues such as genetically modified organisms, the loss of biodiversity, climate change, and nuclear waste cannot be reduced to a matter of science or society and explained through nature-society dualist approaches because of their complexity and heterogeneity. This paper examines how nature-society dualism has been embedded in science studies and geography and how this dualism can be overcome. Actor-Network Theory as an attempt to overcome this nature-society dualism is appropriate in analysing "strange imbriglio" of biology, politics, technoscience, market, value, ethics and facts that constitute our society by focusing on heterogeneous association, and can contribute to providing a useful framework to solve environmental problems.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.41-76
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• 2013

Based on an analysis of the Japanese animation director Kamiyama Kenji's Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, this paper discusses two important subjects in modern technoscience-cyborg and old age. In fact, age has been an important social and political category in the modern world, along with gender, race, and class. However, age has not been a significant research topic for STS scholars. Even though many of these investigators have extensively explored the complex relationship between gender and technoscience, especially after the publication of Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" (1991), few of them have been interested in how age is reconfigured by modern science and technology. If women, as Haraway has claimed, can have a different political and cultural outlook by becoming cyborgs, then, can we expect a similar socio-cultural transformation with regard to the interaction between cyborg and old age? Do the elderly experience lesser age discrimination through the growth of biomedicine and technoscience? Indeed, it is believed that seniors are increasingly becoming cyborgs with advancing age, since their declining bodily functions are consistently replaced and assisted by various biomedical technologies. Does this enable them to overcome ageism and age discrimination as well as their alleged physiological and mental limitations? As an answer to this question, Mike Featherstone has asserted that becoming a cyborg in old age could make the wrinkled skin a mere mask and create diverse new possibilities that were hitherto unavailable to an aging person. Based on my reading of Ghost in the Shell, however, I analyze a more complex set of problems when the senile cyborg is created through the encounter between the elderly and technoscience. I argue that while the senile cyborg could challenge traditional family ideology and nationalism it would leave ageism intact and define a new individualistic life form through a body controlled within the globalized internet and capitalist economy.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.89-103
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• 2011

The recent innovations in technoscience have changed the patterns of everyday lives for women and their politics of identity. Among the various debates on a women's relationship to technoscience, Donna J. Haraway's theory of the cyborg has been one of the most influential, as it provides new modes of conceiving subjectivity as well as new notions of women's shared experiences. For Haraway, the cyborg is an image of a female subject that will lead the future of science and technology as an amalgamation of non-hierarchical differences. This study examines the characteristics and meanings for the distortion, anti-aesthetic body, and clothing in fashion design through the cyborg feminism theory. Characteristics and meanings of the cyborg in fashion designs find their expression through mechanical images, distorted physical transformations, reconstruction of a destructed body, expression of an anatomical and heterogeneous body, and the persona image. Such expressions are not simply an act of distorting and destroying a body image but extending the category of a body, but of going beyond the limit of a real body and create a new body.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.181-214
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• 2015

This study analyzed the characteristics of the politics of technoscience and governance in South Korea, taking advantage of the policy changes on the stem cell research after Hwang's affair. In spite of generally accepted conventional wisdom that stem cell research had been suffering 'crisis' after the Hwang's affair, South Korea succeeded in developing the first and the largest stem cell product in the world. However, considering the fact that the stem cell research capabilities and technological competitiveness of Korea have been assessed as relatively low compared to the development performance, there is a need to extrapolate how such result could be achieved. To answer these questions, we analyzed changes in the R&D expenditure before and after the scandal and verified the 'crisis of stem cell research' following the reduction of financial support from government. From the analysis of literature on the policy reports and news, we described the process of discourse changes in policy and analyzed the characteristics of the politics of technoscience and governance of stem cell research. This study emphasized that the government R&D and regulation policy play the key roles in the development of stem cell research rather than in the technological competitiveness in South Korea. Furthermore, this study argued that democratic governance still does not work under the policy conditions that technocratic decision-making of stem cell research fails to learn from the Hwang's affairs.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.1-26
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• 2008

This essay explores the possibility of risk epistemology based on STS perspective. The starting point is the modern society's dilemma that the more technoscience has been developed, the more modern society has become riskier. The conventional risk epistemology, based on modernist dualism, has a tendency to be negligent of the relationship between risk society and technoscience, since it has only paid attention to either side of objectivity of risk or context of risk. In contrast, STS perspective on risk makes a point of focusing on the need of constructing the comprehensive risk epistemology, instead of the traditional approach based on modernist dualism. Now, this perspective goes ahead through "bridging" between objective risk(nature) and contextual risk(society) toward co-production of risk, as a result that we can no more turn our head from the emergence of new hybrids and, in turn, increase of complexity of heterogeneous networks. As such I suggest the concept of technosphere so as to reflect and display these characteristics of this perspective, and assess the potentiality of the concept.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.1-48
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• 2014

Recently, governance of science and technology emerged as one of most important social problems and as a result it is crucial to understand it in science and technology studies. This article discusses three most important realms in science and technology goverance - research and development, regulation, and social movement - in the concrete Korean contexts. First of all, the Korean state has driven research and development and promoted its commercialization unlike other developed countries. Consequently, this nationalistic view on science disseminated to Korean public and it generated uniformity in research style and organization. Second, science and technology regulations embraced developed countries' policies, leading to its glocalization. As a result, technocratic old governance and new governance including precautionary principle and participatory democracy coexist. Third, the civil society has challenged expertise and state-driven science and technology governance and fueled social movements related to environment, safety, and health issues. The politics of knowledge created by citizens' voluntary participation and collaborative experts made it clear that science and technology should be no longer tool for economic development. In conclusion, we discuss characteristics of science and technology governance in Korea, giving various implication on current research and policy.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.263-301
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• 2015

Digital inclusion is the ability or opportunities of individuals and groups to access and use information technology (IT). Digital inclusion strategies aims to ensure that all citizens regardless of their gender, race and class benefit from IT. Discourse of digital inclusion is notable in that it proposes a desirable relationship between the state, individuals, and the market within the shifting topology of technoscience. Throughout broad discourse analysis of media coverages, in-depth interviews and reports on Korean IT industry, this research argues that dialogues on digital inclusion have substantially influenced the formation of a specific ethical regime. In this regime, individuals should become subjects embodying IT expertise and acceptable codes of conducts. We further discuss that such government-driven ethical regime conflicts with technological citizenship practiced by IT experts and semi-experts. We make theoretical contribution to STS by expanding the concept of technological citizenship to include the rights and obligations of heterogeneous expert and semi-expert groups to form, propose and socially demand alternative developmental pathways of technoscience. We also note that, amid the conflict between ethical regime and technological citizenship, alternative interpretations of gender gap can be forged, providing competing perspectives on women's under-representation and labor conditions in the IT industry. Further research is required to capture the emergence of multiple identities--differentiated by gender, race, class, and more--within the clashing interface between the ethical regime and technological citizenship.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.45-78
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• 2012

What is a disaster? And what can science and technology studies tell us about it? There might be numerous definitions about disaster. In this article, we will posit that disaster is an incident when sociotechnical system actor-network broke down against the other force in their "trial of strength". This is a process that punctualized actor-network is depunctualized, and a status that readiness-to-hand of Being recedes while pesentness-at-hand of tool-being comes forward. Using the concept of disaster as a case study, we will consider how Latourian ontology overlaps with Heideggerian philosophy of technology. This STS approach which hasn't been previously studied might provide us with new theoretical framework that enables us to construe the assemblage of technoscience and nature-society in the field of PUS or NPSS.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.199-222
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• 2014

Functional Magnetic Resonance Angiography (fMRA) was a technoscientific innovation that allows scientists to directly view the changes made in the blood vessels of a brain. fMRA was first developed at Neuroscience Research Institute (NRI) in Korea. fMRA mainly utilizes 7 Tesla MRI technology, and NRI is equipped with the instrument. First article on fMRA was published in 2008, and two more papers in 2010 and 2012 consecutively had been published on the newly developed technique. However, fMRA is a competitive technology with existing fMRI. Both techniques capture microvascular changes in a brain, and by doing it, both techniques visualize the cognitive and affective changes. fMRI technology was introduced by Seiji Ogawa in the early 1990's and has been widely used since then. In contrast, fMRA was a newer technology and rather unknown. Developers of fMRA in NRI used series of signifiant-politics in order to make it better known to scientific community as well as public. By resetting the boundaries of existing concept of fMRI, they tried to lower the threshold of a new concept/technique. This case study shows how technoscientists use semiotic strategies governing new technology.