EASTS covers

Selection of EASTS journal cover image

One of the features that distinguishes Science, Technology, and Society: An International Journal (EASTS) from other academic journals is its cover. We have designed distinctive covers for each issue since EASTS inception. To date, 44 covers have been created - many of which are based on fantastic photos or artworks that represent the spirit of the issues as well as also often telling stories of their own. We prepare descriptions for each of these covers; though brief, we put a lot of effort into them! We present you with our 10 best cover images that are loved by our readers.

About EASTS Journal

Sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (EASTS) aims to bring together East Asian and Western scholars from the fields of science, technology, and society (STS). Examining issues such as human embryonic stem-cell research, family and reproductive technologies, and the globalization of Chinese medicine, the journal publishes research on how society and culture in East Asia interact with science, technology, and medicine. EASTS serves as a platform to facilitate the exchange of growing efforts of STS networks in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe, further fostering an internationally open and inclusive community. The journal is composed of research articles, research notes, critical reviews, and book reviews.

Issue 5.2

Cover Image: Cover Photo by Harry Huang. The rice grain shown on the photo is a variety within Japonica type, currently cultivated in the Guandu Plain of Taipei basin. Taiwanese used to cultivate Indica rice. Varieties within Japnoica type were first introduced in Taiwan in the 1920s during the Japanese colonial period. Its growing popularity in Taiwan may indicate how traveling of rice has been closely related with the political, social and cultural transformation of a society. 

Issue 7.2

Cover Image: A man used a radiation detector to measure levels of radiation in a pack of strawberries produced in Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture, during an event to promote the safety of the region's agricultural products in Tokyo in April, 2011.

Issue 8.1

Cover Image:The cover images, entitled Dissection Series, are created by Hao Liang 郝量, a young Chinese painter who is interested in the interplay between tradition and modernity in the context of Chinese painting. 

Issue 8.3

Cover Image: Yi Yu-tae (李惟台, 1916-1999), Research (探究), 1944, Ink and color on paper, 212 x 153 cm, The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Special thanks to Director Chung Hyung-Min and Professor Kim Yung Sik for their guidance and supports.

Issue 8.4

Cover Image: In an ethnic medicine research unit in Nanning, Guangxi (China), local medicinal plants are gathered, preserved, stored, classified, labeled and arrayed in pharmaceutical groups for display to visiting students and scholars.

Issue 11.1

Cover Image: The cover is an installation art project entitled “Steady State” (2009) by Irwan Bagja Dermawan, a young Indonesian artist who is based in Bandung, Indonesia and Helsinki, Finland. The photograph is taken by Lasti Kurnia, a Jakarta-based underwater photographer and journalist. The photograph won the 2010 Indonesian PhotoJournalist Award.

Issue 11.2

Cover Image:Togoshi Ginza Station, July 1940

Curtesy of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida

The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection TD1993.69.1.78

Photo: Lynton Gardiner

Issue 11.3

Cover image: The Blood of Christ (基督的鮮血) by Liu Shih-Fen 劉世芬 (1964-), color pencil on paper, a negative image of the artist’s body and an MRI scan of her brain, 120cm x 120cm, 2005. Liu Shih-Fen, a gynecological nursing practitioner who became an artist in her 30s, has reflected upon spiritual, bodily, and medical aspects of lives in a series of works titled Clinical Path of the Sphinx.

Issue 11.4

Cover image: This image is from "南方の據點臺灣：寫真報道"（Taiwan—Stronghold of the South: A Photo Report), an introduction to Taiwan mainly through photography, published by Asahi Shimbun in 1944, a year before the collapse of the Japanese Empire. This particular image bore a caption calling the island “the center of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Special thanks to Lin-yi Tseng for helping locate the source of the image.

Issue 12.1

Cover Image: The cover features Korean artist U-Ram Choe’s work Custos Cavum. Like his other works, Custos Cavum is not just a moving sculpture but almost a living entity.

Custos Cavum means something like “guardian of the hole,” and inspired by Choe’s blurring of animate and inanimate we’ve chosen it for this issue. According to Choe, “Once upon a time, there were two worlds … connected to each other through a number of small holes, as if the worlds were breathing through these holes. However, the holes had a tendency to close up, so there were guardians next to each one to keep them open.” Given our ambition to make STS a portal connecting the social and the natural worlds, aren’t we STS scholars all in a sense Custos Cavum?

Issue 12.3

Novelist, artist, and environmentalist Wu Ming-Yi (吳明益，1971-) provided the illustrations for the Taiwanese edition of his book The Man with the Compound Eyes ([2011] 2016). Combining fantasy and realism, the story portrays a community on the east coast of Taiwan. There a widow, a cat, aboriginal neighbors, butterflies, a young boy from a South Pacific island who has wandered to Taiwan through a vortex of trash, and many other characters both human and nonhuman all find their life journeys intertwining.

Illustration: Wu Ming-Yi

For the cover of the Complex Chinese Character edition (2016) of The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi.

Read more about EASTS journal at：

http://www.4sonline.org/prizes/infrastructure

https://read.dukeupress.edu/easts/issue

https://easst.net/article/striving-for-harmony-in-diversity-easts-and-th...