Report on the Workshop, ‘Engineering Interventions: Interdisciplinary Engagements with Engineers’, 12–13 November 2024

Linking regional expertise with disciplinary theory-motivated rigour is one of the key challenges for Japanese Studies. With Acculturation Theory as the theoretical basis, this paper develops and examines a framework that distinguishes variations in interdisciplinary engagement strategies among scholars working at the interstices of Japanese Studies and Business Studies. The findings should assist Area Studies scholarship in identifying how to shape relations with recipient Social Science disciplines—both at the individual and institutional level. We chart intergroup relations from two perspectives: (i) national and international institutions and (ii) interview data obtained from scholars working in Japanese Business Studies. We find variations in how Japanese Studies scholars interact with the field of Business Studies. These result from emphasis placed on the maintenance of Japanese Studies scholarship on the one hand and openness to engagement with the business discipline on the other. Integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalisation reflect realistic ‘sojourning’ (or interdisciplinary engagement) options available to Japanese Studies scholarship. By conceptualising interdisciplinarity as an acculturating change process, our framework offers a systematic understanding of why, how and to what effect Area Studies interacts with Social Science disciplines.

Over recent decades, influential agri-food tech actors, institutions, policymakers and others have fostered dominant techno-optimistic, future visions of food and agriculture that are having profound material impacts in present agri-food worlds. Analyzing such realities has become paramount for scholars working across the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical agri-food studies, many of whom contribute to STSFAN—the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network. This article introduces a Special Issue featuring the scholarship of STSFAN members, which cover a range of case studies and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary engagements involving such contested agri-food futures. Their contributions are unique in that they emerged from the network’s specific modus operandi: a workshopping practice that supports the constructive, interdisciplinary dialogue necessary for critical research and rigorous analyses of science and technology in agri-food settings. This introduction offers an overview of STS and critical agri-food studies scholarship, including their historical entanglements in respective studies of food scandals, scientific regimes and technological determinism. We illustrate how interdisciplinary engagement across these fields has contributed to the emergent field of what we term agri-food technoscience scholarship, which the contributions of this Special Issue speak to. After a brief discussion of STS concepts, theories and methods shaping agri-food policy, technology design and manufacturing, we present the eleven Special Issue contributions in three thematic clusters: influential actors and their agri-food imaginaries; obfuscated (material) realities in agri-food technologies; and conflictual and constructive engagements in academia and agri-food. The introduction ends with a short reflection on future research trajectories in agri-food technoscience scholarship.

The field religion and international relations (IR) has been established over the last twenty years within the discipline of IR. It marks a new (largely twenty-first century) set of interdisciplinary engagements, bringing together political science and the sociology of religion. “Religion and IR” and “religious studies” continue to conduct their business independently, in different conferences, journals, and book series, but their interests increasingly overlap. This enquiry interprets religion and IR as a “turn to the local.” This is displayed in its concern with events at the local level that have significance that travels up the scale of levels of analysis to events that have international significance. The turn to the local offers compelling arguments for shifting the focus in IR away from states and on to relations between local, national, and international actors. Engaging here with influential works in religion and IR published over the last fifteen years, I argue that it is the turn to the local that offers the most scope for collaboration between scholars of religion and IR and scholars in religious studies.

The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks is the fifth Wenner-Gren Symposium to be published as an open-access supplement of Current Anthropology. The symposium was organized by M. Susan Lindee (University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.) and Ricardo Ventura Santos (Museu Nacional & Fundacao Oswaldo Cruz, Brazil) and was held March 5–12, 2010, at the Hotel Rosa dos Ventos, Teresopolis, Brazil (fig. 1). There are interrelated and compelling reasons for WennerGren interest in this symposium. As Lindee and Santos emphasize in their introduction (Lindee and Santos 2012), modern biological anthropologists, and particularly human biologists, are generally embarrassed by the history of their discipline and rarely have an interest in delving into it. Rather, most see themselves as the scientific wing of anthropology, with little to learn from the past or from research less than a decade or so old, leaving the history to historians of science. Accompanying this lack of interest is an apparent absence of appreciation for the rich diversity in international biological anthropology and the development of these varied orientations and approaches. The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations is intended to provide an easily accessible resource to help remedy this situation. It builds on the prior success of World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006), which grew out of a 2003 Wenner-Gren Symposium of the same name, looking at the interconnected global historical trajectories in aspects of social anthropology. Papers in the current supplementary issue are written by anthropologists, historians of science, and scholars of science studies and address the international development of the discipline as well as its contemporary condition and potential future development. Papers included in this collection cover the development

Workshop Proceedings: Informed Consent in Biobanking–from the Key Barriers, Challenges, and Perceptions to Digital Innovations

Crowds are a feature of large cities, occurring not only at mass gatherings but also at routine events such as the journey to work. To address extreme crowding, various computer models for crowd movement have been developed in the past decade, and we review these and show how they can be used to identify health and safety issues. State-of-the-art models that simulate the spread of epidemics operate on a population level, but the collection of fine-scale data might enable the development of models for epidemics that operate on a microscopic scale, similar to models for crowd movement. We provide an example of such simulations, showing how an individual-based crowd model can mirror aggregate susceptible-infected-recovered models that have been the main models for epidemics so far.

<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> The Societas Meteorologica Palatina arranged the first international meteorological network in a modern sense being in operation between 1781 and 1792 during the last period of enlightenment. A total of 39 stations contributed observations. The original aim was to investigate influences of the moon and planets on the atmosphere. Instruments were provided free, a physically very advanced instruction guaranteed reliable observational results and the data collected at three hours per day were printed at high costs in the Ephemerides Meteorologicae of Mannheim. This wealth of data has become a famous treasure trove for scientists and has been used later very often for climatic studies, climatic comparisons of different locations in textbooks, for overcoming antiquated and find new explanations on meteorological phenomena, for studying extremes of meteorological parameters. Even in modern times, the data were evaluated and used to reconstruct historical weather maps. Although meanwhile some problems of the historical instruments have been recognised most of the conclusions are still basically correct. The data were also used for verifying geomagnetic models or proxy data from tree ring analysis. This network stimulated many scholars for special meteorological studies and was attractive for new stations to join the network. The early death of the meteorological secretary Hemmer and the Napoleonic wars brought about the end of the project. Nevertheless, many of the stations continued the observations using the available instruments.

<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> The Societas Meteorologica Palatina arranged the first international meteorological network in a modern sense being in operation between 1781 and 1792 during the last period of enlightenment. A total of 39 stations contributed observations. The original aim was to investigate influences of the moon and planets on the atmosphere. Instruments were provided free, a physically very advanced instruction guaranteed reliable observational results and the data collected at three hours per day were printed at high costs in the Ephemerides Meteorologicae of Mannheim. This wealth of data has become a famous treasure trove for scientists and has been used later very often for climatic studies, climatic comparisons of different locations in textbooks, for overcoming antiquated and find new explanations on meteorological phenomena, for studying extremes of meteorological parameters. Even in modern times, the data were evaluated and used to reconstruct historical weather maps. Although meanwhile some problems of the historical instruments have been recognised most of the conclusions are still basically correct. The data were also used for verifying geomagnetic models or proxy data from tree ring analysis. This network stimulated many scholars for special meteorological studies and was attractive for new stations to join the network. The early death of the meteorological secretary Hemmer and the Napoleonic wars brought about the end of the project. Nevertheless, many of the stations continued the observations using the available instruments.

<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> The Societas Meteorologica Palatina arranged the first international meteorological network in a modern sense being in operation between 1781 and 1792 during the last period of enlightenment. A total of 39 stations contributed observations. The original aim was to investigate influences of the moon and planets on the atmosphere. Instruments were provided free, a physically very advanced instruction guaranteed reliable observational results and the data collected at three hours per day were printed at high costs in the Ephemerides Meteorologicae of Mannheim. This wealth of data has become a famous treasure trove for scientists and has been used later very often for climatic studies, climatic comparisons of different locations in textbooks, for overcoming antiquated and find new explanations on meteorological phenomena, for studying extremes of meteorological parameters. Even in modern times, the data were evaluated and used to reconstruct historical weather maps. Although meanwhile some problems of the historical instruments have been recognised most of the conclusions are still basically correct. The data were also used for verifying geomagnetic models or proxy data from tree ring analysis. This network stimulated many scholars for special meteorological studies and was attractive for new stations to join the network. The early death of the meteorological secretary Hemmer and the Napoleonic wars brought about the end of the project. Nevertheless, many of the stations continued the observations using the available instruments.

<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> The Societas Meteorologica Palatina arranged the first international meteorological network in a modern sense being in operation between 1781 and 1792 during the last period of enlightenment. A total of 39 stations contributed observations. The original aim was to investigate influences of the moon and planets on the atmosphere. Instruments were provided free, a physically very advanced instruction guaranteed reliable observational results and the data collected at three hours per day were printed at high costs in the Ephemerides Meteorologicae of Mannheim. This wealth of data has become a famous treasure trove for scientists and has been used later very often for climatic studies, climatic comparisons of different locations in textbooks, for overcoming antiquated and find new explanations on meteorological phenomena, for studying extremes of meteorological parameters. Even in modern times, the data were evaluated and used to reconstruct historical weather maps. Although meanwhile some problems of the historical instruments have been recognised most of the conclusions are still basically correct. The data were also used for verifying geomagnetic models or proxy data from tree ring analysis. This network stimulated many scholars for special meteorological studies and was attractive for new stations to join the network. The early death of the meteorological secretary Hemmer and the Napoleonic wars brought about the end of the project. Nevertheless, many of the stations continued the observations using the available instruments.

<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> The Societas Meteorologica Palatina arranged the first international meteorological network in a modern sense being in operation between 1781 and 1792 during the last period of enlightenment. A total of 39 stations contributed observations. The original aim was to investigate influences of the moon and planets on the atmosphere. Instruments were provided free, a physically very advanced instruction guaranteed reliable observational results and the data collected at three hours per day were printed at high costs in the Ephemerides Meteorologicae of Mannheim. This wealth of data has become a famous treasure trove for scientists and has been used later very often for climatic studies, climatic comparisons of different locations in textbooks, for overcoming antiquated and find new explanations on meteorological phenomena, for studying extremes of meteorological parameters. Even in modern times, the data were evaluated and used to reconstruct historical weather maps. Although meanwhile some problems of the historical instruments have been recognised most of the conclusions are still basically correct. The data were also used for verifying geomagnetic models or proxy data from tree ring analysis. This network stimulated many scholars for special meteorological studies and was attractive for new stations to join the network. The early death of the meteorological secretary Hemmer and the Napoleonic wars brought about the end of the project. Nevertheless, many of the stations continued the observations using the available instruments.

<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> The Societas Meteorologica Palatina arranged the first international meteorological network in a modern sense being in operation between 1781 and 1792 during the last period of enlightenment. A total of 39 stations contributed observations. The original aim was to investigate influences of the moon and planets on the atmosphere. Instruments were provided free, a physically very advanced instruction guaranteed reliable observational results and the data collected at three hours per day were printed at high costs in the Ephemerides Meteorologicae of Mannheim. This wealth of data has become a famous treasure trove for scientists and has been used later very often for climatic studies, climatic comparisons of different locations in textbooks, for overcoming antiquated and find new explanations on meteorological phenomena, for studying extremes of meteorological parameters. Even in modern times, the data were evaluated and used to reconstruct historical weather maps. Although meanwhile some problems of the historical instruments have been recognised most of the conclusions are still basically correct. The data were also used for verifying geomagnetic models or proxy data from tree ring analysis. This network stimulated many scholars for special meteorological studies and was attractive for new stations to join the network. The early death of the meteorological secretary Hemmer and the Napoleonic wars brought about the end of the project. Nevertheless, many of the stations continued the observations using the available instruments.

<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> The Societas Meteorologica Palatina arranged the first international meteorological network in a modern sense being in operation between 1781 and 1792 during the last period of enlightenment. A total of 39 stations contributed observations. The original aim was to investigate influences of the moon and planets on the atmosphere. Instruments were provided free, a physically very advanced instruction guaranteed reliable observational results and the data collected at three hours per day were printed at high costs in the Ephemerides Meteorologicae of Mannheim. This wealth of data has become a famous treasure trove for scientists and has been used later very often for climatic studies, climatic comparisons of different locations in textbooks, for overcoming antiquated and find new explanations on meteorological phenomena, for studying extremes of meteorological parameters. Even in modern times, the data were evaluated and used to reconstruct historical weather maps. Although meanwhile some problems of the historical instruments have been recognised most of the conclusions are still basically correct. The data were also used for verifying geomagnetic models or proxy data from tree ring analysis. This network stimulated many scholars for special meteorological studies and was attractive for new stations to join the network. The early death of the meteorological secretary Hemmer and the Napoleonic wars brought about the end of the project. Nevertheless, many of the stations continued the observations using the available instruments.

Communication scholars were among the first non‐computer‐specialists to see the value of international computer networking to academic work. By the early 1990s, a variety of network resources had become available for students and scholars in communication studies.

Performing Region in Southeast Asian Film Industries Jasmine Nadua Trice (bio) What does it mean to invent a regional cinema? Film and media scholars have long troubled the conventional cartographies used to map cinemas by nation-states, turning to models based on global flows and deterritorialization or local sites of production and reception.1 How does region become a spatial logic for film production, distribution, and reception? Inspired by work in critical border studies, I would like to propose a shift from the concept of region as a fixed, geographic area to the idea of region as a historically contingent practice, a reterritorializing performance that emerges amid a confluence of specific cultural and economic circumstances. Such conditions lead to organizing practices and institutional networks that work above and below the nation-state, that seek new scales for collaboration and exchange. I find performance theory especially valuable for considering regional film organizing because it emphasizes the projected, fictional dimensions of cultural forms. As Diana Taylor argues, “Performance moves between the as if and the is, between pretend and new constructions of the ‘real’”; it “can be understood as process— as enactment, exertion, intervention, [End Page 188] and expenditure.”2 Scholars in production studies have made use of performance theory to describe the complex dynamics of industrial practices.3 What if we also use performance to understand region as a verb, to see regioning practices as processes of film-industrial world-making? How might this disrupt the fixity of spatial categories and help us to understand the material conditions in which such performances become necessary, even desired, within particular industrial and institutional filmmaking contexts? Region is always, to some extent, fictional. In the case of Southeast Asia, debates around regional borders often turn to proto-or anti-statist spatial formations. For example, much scholarship discusses the lowland political structure of the mandala, which had no fixed territorial boundaries, its influence fading with distance from a central core.4 In another alternative mapping, James Scott offers an anarchist history of the highlands region known as the Zomia, stretching from Vietnam to India, that focuses on a diverse range of indigenous communities that choose to remain stateless.5 The area that would later become Southeast Asia has also been seen by its larger neighbors as Suwarnadwipa or Goldland (from the perspective of India) and Nanyang or South Seas (in China). Region, here, is porous and dispersed, less a territory than a concept. Such relational cartography grafts onto more contemporary maps of global film production that privilege larger, globalized industries.6 What is interesting about Southeast Asian cinema is the way that film organizations and practitioners have taken on region as an externally imposed, scalar category, a relic of the so-called Cold War, and reshaped it into a desired fiction. This in itself is not unusual, necessarily. Regional co-productions have been a means of consolidating technological and financial resources, often for big-budget, blockbuster movies.7 But in Southeast Asia, the notion of a regional, filmmaking identity is not rooted in state or commercial imperatives. Rather, film practitioners draw regional boundaries through affective affinities and performative identities, staged for international and regional networks. Loosely cohered filmmaking scenes and entangled networks of film festivals, arts funders, and state cultural bodies become staging grounds for tactical performances of what a regional cinema might look like. In their most utopic iterations, such regioning practices [End Page 189] promise cosmopolitanism without globalism, locality without parochialism; they recenter those areas often pushed to the peripheries of global film culture. Regioning practices are often complex, reflexive, and provisional, as the following accounts suggest. Founded in 2017, Purin Pictures is a private fund dedicated to supporting “independent cinema in Southeast Asia.”8 It began as a project of the Thailand-based Purin Foundation, led by filmmaker Visra Vichit-Vadakan.9 While the foundation initially focused on social development projects, its emphasis eventually shifted toward filmmaking. Four Thai filmmakers now manage the fund, which supports grants for production and postproduction. They aim to highlight “underrepresented voices in SEA cinema,” offering at least one grant each session to first-or second-time women filmmakers. The organization explicitly sees its mission as compensating...