On the Possibility of Philippine STS: Collaborating toward a Special Issue

In the Philippines and for its diaspora, our current political climates demonstrate the urgency with which we must expand concepts of STS. The growth of disinformation networks, authoritarian censorship, neocolonial militarism, and the deliberate extraction of labor through technoscientific industries have demanded that we develop a theoretical framework that attends to the unique historical, political, and social conditions of the archipelago. One of the ways we are working toward this is by assembling current research from scholars who are actively making the field of Philippine STS.

For this presentation, we will discuss our guest co-edited special issue on Philippine STS, the first of its kind to be published by the flagship Philippine studies journal, Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. We will cover how the issue and its corresponding papers push the horizon of STS through Philippine empirical data. We will also share our lessons learned, particularly as US-based STS scholars working to question positivist conceptions of science and to bridge intellectual communities transnationally and across disciplines. Yet, still, the special issue features the promise of an open and encouraged intellectual alliance most especially between social scientific scholars and STEM researchers in the Philippines and abroad. Finally, we will problematize the notion of a nation-defined field and instead highlight the ways in which a “Philippine” STS should continue to undo the spatial and temporal limits of the nation form.