MIT (Made-In-Taiwan), Redux: New Approaches to Material and Technological Cultures in Taiwan

Image Credit: Wu Bai’s music video “Taiwan Made” (2005) features a self-assembled toy truck that bears the tag “Made in Taiwan” at its rear.

Organized by Shu-mei Shih – Irving and Jean Stone Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA – and Kun Xian (Raymond) Shen – Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA – this year's conference on "MIT (Made-in-Taiwan), Redux: New Approaches to Material and Technological Cultures in Taiwan" is presented as part of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative, a partnership of UCLA and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) that aims to create research synergies to promote cutting-edge research in Taiwan studies.

In recent years, from presidential address to academic discourse, the emerging rhetoric of Taiwan as a “silicon shield”—referring to its near monopoly over the production of semiconductors—has emphasized the key role the archipelagic nation has played in global geopolitics and material culture. Indeed, across various historical periods, the “Made-In-Taiwan” tag line has conjured impressions and sentiments from quality and pride to defect and derision, both domestically and internationally in different contexts, signifying its shifting degrees of modernization and its changing roles amidst globalization. The risk of merely equating Taiwan with its products, however, lies in a potential reification of its complex history and culture, reducing it to a logistical factory in the global supply chain. Just as the singer Wu Bai reminds us in his song “Taiwan Made” (Tâi-Uân Tsè-Tsō), the raw materials and technical knowledges that feed into Taiwanese products have been imported from every part of the world, a process marked by the influences of settlers, colonizers, and empires, who similarly impacted the language and identities of its people.

Taking the resurgence of “MIT” discourse under the current climate of global technological war as its cue, this conference invites scholars to critically reflect on technical objects and production culture in Taiwan materially, socio-historically, and philosophically. Whether it is the Japanese colonial doctrine of Southern Expansion that paved the way for current foray into Southeast Asian markets, the American Aid during the Cold War that enabled major infrastructural construction, or the Nationalist policy of Export Processing that pushed labor-intensive products to circulate globally, MIT products now range from creative and media industry, information and electronic technology, public health and medicine, food and beverage, and others. How have different historical and ideological forces shaped Taiwan’s material and technological cultures? What material and infrastructural specificities of these productions impacted socio-cultural lives? And what are the cultural and representational aspects of these products and how did they shape discourses and practices of culture? The conference invites scholars across different disciplines to rethink critical approaches and frameworks for the material and technological cultures in Taiwan.

Download the complete conference program (Coming Soon)

 Day 1 | Friday, May 2

Royce Hall, Rm 314 (3rd Floor)

10:00-10:30am: Opening Remarks

• Alexandra Stern, Dean of the Division of Humanities, Professor of English and History, UCLA
• Cindy Fan, Vice Provost for International Studies and Global Engagement, UCLA
• Andrea Goldman, Interim Director of Asia Pacific Center and Associate Professor of History, UCLA
• Nikky Lin, Director, International Taiwan Studies Center; Professor, Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU)
• Shu-mei Shih, Director of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative and Professor  of Asian Languages & Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, UCLA
• Raymond Kun-Xian Shen, Ph.D. Candidate, Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA

10:30am-12:30pm: Panel 1 - Dreaming of Robots and Computers

Moderator: Andrea Goldman, UCLA

• Honghong Tinn (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), Incompatible Computer Dreams: Contested Computer Exports from Taiwan to the United States in the 1980s
• Ching Hung (National Chung Cheng University), The Birth of Taiwan’s Local Sci-Fi Comic Robot: A Mirror of Taiwan’s Science and Technology Culture
•  Kuan-Hung Lo (University of Maryland, College Park), Rethinking Materiality in Robotic Design: A Study of Taiwanese Robotics Teams
•  Tosti Hsu-Cheng Chiang (National Taiwan Normal University), Credibility Identification System: Supporting Media Literacy Education and Exploring Learning Effectiveness

12:30-1:30pm: Lunch

1:30-3:00pm: Panel 2 - Building Infrastructure and Communities

Moderator: Nikky Lin, NTNU

• Anru Lee (City University of New York), Urban Transit Systems, Technological Culture, and Civic Imagination in Taiwan
• Kuang-Chi Hung (National Taiwan University), Plates, Pepper Shakers, and Everyday Wooden Products: Taiwan’s Invisible Champion and Cold War Environmental History
• Jo Ann Wang (Pitzer College), Imagining Energy Communities: Citizen Power Plants and Transition(al) Desires in Taiwan

3:00-3:30pm: Coffee Break

3:30-5:00pm: Artist Presentation - The Forces of Water

Moderator: TBA

• Yu Hsin Su (Artist-in-Residence, 18th Street Arts Center), Water: A Geoarchive Screening: Particular Waters (dir. Yu Hsin Su, 18min, 2023)

5:00-5:30pm: Reception

Day 2 | Saturday, May 3

Royce Hall, Rm 314 (3rd Floor)

9:30-11:00am: Panel 4 - Visualizing Cold War Taiwan

Moderator: TBA

• Joseph Ho (Albion College), Paper Windows, Fragmented Lenses: Materializing Vernacular Photography in Martial Law Era Taiwan
• Chang-min Yu (National Taiwan University), Formosa for Americans: Screening Taiwan in the Age of Cold War Diplomacy
• Evelyn Shih (University of Colorado, Boulder), Televisual Taiwan: Fragrant Formosa and Localist Innervation in Color TV

11:15am-12:15pm: Panel 5 - Sounding Contemporary Taiwan

Moderator: TBA

• Meredith Schweig (Emory University), Of Factories and Studios: Listening for Taiwan in Hip-Hop's Technological Infrastructure
• Raymond Kun-Xian Shen (University of California, Los Angeles), Overcoming Pirate Modernity: Taiwan’s Forgotten Culture of Campaign Music and Commercial Mixtapes

12:15-1:45pm: Lunch

1:45-3:15pm: Panel 6 - Of Affect and Environment

Moderator: TBA

• Pei-Chun Viola Hsieh (National Taiwan Normal University), On the Political Proximity of Southeast Asian Immersive Projection
• Belinda Qian He (University of Maryland, College Park), Undomesticating Justice in Taiwan: Women and the Art of Working in/with the Wild
• Jane Hu (University of Southern California), Untitled paper on Tao Lin’s novels

3:15-3:45pm: Coffee Break

3:45-4:45pm: Concluding Forum

Moderator: Shu-mei Shih (UCLA)