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It will be otherwise. Report from inaugural AusSTS Interdisciplinary Workshop, Melbourne 3-5 July, 2019

Intro.

In a span of three days of AusSTS interdisciplinary workshop in Melbourne researchers at their beginning of academic careers were invited to attend multiple keynote lectures, panel sessions, workshops, film screening and a creative challenge. The conference brought together doctoral candidates and early careers researchers from Australia and New Zealand to create a platform for STS infused debates and thinking. Consequently, the conference provided a space for fostering inter-institutional relations and collaboration ultimately shaping a strong Austrolasian STS community.

Thao Phan opening speech. Photo by Giles Campbell-Wright, Deakin University.

Provocations.

When receiving the call for papers, I remember being rather puzzled by the format of papers proposed by the organizers – five minutes presentations followed by approximately forty minutes of conversation with panellists. I was actually worried what can be delivered in just 5 minutes! However, in practice, I was pleasantly surprised that this quite innovative framework worked out very interestingly indeed. Presenters swiftly rose to the call for short, more provocative and bold papers as an alternative to analytical and descriptive presentations. Hence, all twelve sessions were fuelled by affective, lively debates and brainstorming instead of a mere reporting from the research fields. Session themes such as narrative, evidence, care, binary, code or elemental also embodied minimalistic yet dynamic flow of the event. There were two vital common threads reiterated throughout all panels: 1) the role and position of STS research in contemporary academia and beyond, 2) the ways and means of working and thinking with STS concepts. Therefore, in contrast to what Steve Fuller claims STS community summoned in Melbourne demonstrated how scientists could walk the walk and be “socially and materially bound to the outcomes of policy decisions taken on the basis of their advice“(Fuller, 2017).

The keynote presentations have also exemplified the input of critical lens of STS into the rigid academic and social concepts. Cordelia’s Fine ‘50 Shades of Grey Matter’ keynote lecture accentuated the themes underlying the workshop: political engagement through one’s own work. Fine demonstrated how social sciencists can engage with lifelong critical debates in STEM: in this case the discussion addressed neuro-sexism. However, Fine has not been holding back on her critical unpacking of neuroscientific research. And even though she would not describe herself as an STS-r, there were many visible overlaps between her approach and STS feminist technoscience work.

The second keynote ‘Transgenerational Politics, Solidarity and Justice-to-Come’ facilitated a discussion between Prof. Jack Halberstam and Dr J.R. Latham. Issues of queer and trans visibility and politics were put in current socio-political practices in the United States and Australia. Particularly the ‘Ockham’s razor’ moment stood out when Latham argued that neither the LGBTQIA+ community nor society in general need sophisticated policies to address trans inclusion in arenas such as sport. In his words, “Trans people don’t need 300 page policy documents, we just need to let people live their gender the way they want to.” Once again, we could witness a direct political intervention afforded by the AusSTS space.

Practices

Similarly, all four organized workshops addressed the problems of public, political and ethical engagement of academic research. The first workshop on ‘Podcasting’ brought up questions and experiences about various aspects of podcasting in the academic contexts. We could exchange experiences with this form of cooperation and coproduction. More importantly, a fair amount of time had been given to – what STS appreciates most – invisible work behind the final results. So, a quick training on editing and sound engineering unearthed how much actual time of production is needed for an one hour long podcast; subsequently, we could also see how project management skills are needed in order to run a successful podcast series; last but not least, an accent has been put on self-promotion because – as it turns out – social media engagement is crucial in building up an audience.

Secondly, workshop ‘Studying up, down, slow and fast’ directly linked to the practices of working within various spaces and domains, from energy transition through nanomedicine to opioid crisis. The first part of the workshop was focused on unpacking what actually, in daily practices ‘slow, down and fast’ might entail. Additionally, the discussion on “slow science” and its practical implementation working in energy field (Declan Kuch) and hepatitis C elimination policy (Kari Lancaster) was ignited. Divided up into three groups, each attempted to put this metaphor in use within the institutional context. The second part consisted of working on specific cases where STS framework was to be applied to inform new policies. Especially interesting was discussion on addressing the methamphetamine crisis in Australia. Employing the notion of ‘re-problematisation’ (Bacchi, 2018; Lancaster et al., 2017) participants proposed how shifting the focus from ‘ice’ itself to, for instance, the redefinition of categories of addiction or drug consumption could potentially help reducing methamphetamine intake. In short, it was clear how an STS lens, when put in practice, can change the optics of locating problems in contemporary ongoing and pressing public debates.

Gut feelings exhibition at Melbourne Museum. Photo by Giles Campbell-Wright, Deakin University.

The Melbourne Museum Creative Challenge was set as a creative conclusion of the conference placed in Melbourne Museum where participants were introduced to the current ongoing exhibitions to later face a specific creative task. For me, the most striking in all museum’s exhibitions was the newly open “Gut Feelings” exhibition. In a nutshell, it illustrates the very recent idea that our mind and microbes are intimately related and that our microbiome landscapes may heavily influence our mental health and wellbeing. The perfect timing of the exhibition is even more vivid given that Medical Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark curates “Mind the Gut” exhibition! Both are a perfect ways to disseminate the STS research outside of academia and trigger questions about medical knowledges, guts, bowels, culture, identity, mental well-being and microbes. In Melbourne, however, it is also possible to voluntarily participate by leaving a trace of one’s saliva which would reveal microbiome landscape of it. The results of a creative challenge materialised in a provocations to re-image and re-interpret objects within the museum. Working in teams, we presented innovative and creative ideas about potential future exhibitions that invoked and elucidated thinking across disciplines and standard curator practices.

Team collaboration. Photo by Giles Campbell-Wright, Deakin University.

Conclusion.

The conference brought together doctoral candidates and early careers researchers from Australia and New Zealand to create a platform for STS infused debates and thinking. However, along the way (Law, 2009), it very clearly transpired that AusSTS endorses very strong political engagement. Virtually all panel discussions, workshops and group collaboration accentuated the pressing need to switch from thinking, working, researching on to thinking, working, researching with. To make STS informed interventions locally situated and locally sensitive (Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015). Hence, given STS vast and broad interdisciplinary reach, the situatedness could penetrate academia. There was no ‘full stop’ after the well-known slogan: it could be otherwise. The workshops – across all three days – demonstrated how it could and how it will be otherwise.

Thank you to the organising team, led by Thao Phan (Deakin University) that put together this fantastic event:

Timothy Neale, Deakin University
Gemma Smart, University of Sydney
Kari Lancaster, UNSW
Michaela Spencer, Charles Darwin University
Jacina Leong, RMIT

Event Sponsors:

Deakin Science and Society Network (SSN)
Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science (ANU CPAS)
Charles Darwin University Northern Institute (NI)
University of Sydney School of History and Philosophy of Science
Anthropocene Campus Melbourne
The Australian Association of the History, Philosophy and Social Study of Science (AAHPSSS)
UNSW Environmental Humanities

You can find the final program of the AusSTS2019 interdisciplinary workshop here.

Full album with high resolution images of the event is available here.

Bibliography

Bacchi C (2018) Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a Poststructural Analytic Strategy. Contemporary Drug Problems 45(1): 3–14. DOI: 10.1177/0091450917748760.

Fuller, S. (2017) Is STS all Talk and no Walk? EASST Review 36(1): 21-22.

Lancaster K, Treloar C and Ritter A (2017) ‘Naloxone works’: The politics of knowledge in ‘evidence-based’ drug policy. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 21(3): 278–294. DOI: 10.1177/1363459316688520.

Law J (2009) Seeing Like a Survey. Cultural Sociology 3(2): 239–256. DOI: 10.1177/1749975509105533.

Zuiderent-Jerak T (2015) Situated Intervention: Sociological Experiment in Health Care. Inside technology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

easst review

Doing difference differently in Northern Australia today: The beginnings of TopEndSTS

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Conferences are well known for the opportunity they provide to spark our imagination and to generate productive networks between researchers from different universities and institutes. Our small group of scholars from Charles Darwin University (CDU) in the Northern Territory of Australia experienced an interesting twist on this narrative recently. Our attendance at two major STS conferences – EASST2018 Conference in Lancaster in July and the 4S Conference in Sydney last month – revealed to us that through the eyes of (some) others, there was seemingly a clear and coherent ‘hub’ of Darwin based STS researchers. This was welcome news for us and an understanding we are now seeking to cultivate. However, it was certainly not a realisation that we had made ourselves!

This year was the first-time scholars from northern Australia have travelled together to attend large, international STS gatherings; an effort significantly assisted by this year’s location of 4S in Sydney. At these events we have found the opportunities for engaging with other STS scholars invaluable. Over the course of delivering and listening to presentations, and through formal engagements and informal networking, we came to learn more about current debate and issues in STS, as well as to develop a stronger sense of the approaches and practices that we share. While we have been working together for a number of years and are collaborating on research and teaching projects, it took the experience of being at these conferences to realise that there were certain research commitments we embody and genealogies that we hold in common.

Fig. 1 Presentation by TopEndSTS member Jennifer Macdonald at 4S Sydney, 2018.

Pushed by the experience of these conference events, we selected a title for our emerging group that speaks to our local situations, as well as our involvement in broader STS networks – ‘TopEndSTS’. For those not familiar with the term, the ‘Top End’ is generally used to indicate the northernmost parts of Australia, and for us it evokes a sense of situated research which includes and engages disparate climatic environments, complex interplays of connection and ‘remoteness’, and the co-presence of many differing Western and Indigenous modes of people-place making.

As a group, we see TopEndSTS (sometimes the twitter handle @TopEndSTS, sometimes just a name) as a growing and evolving group of STS scholars who are generally, though not always, based in northern Australia. As scholars we often juggle several hats, with our commitment to ‘STS’ often complementing other disciplinary affiliations (for example, in anthropology, human geography, resilience and heritage studies) and our position as scholars often merging with other professional roles (for example, as language workers, government bureaucrats, arts practitioners and archaeologists). However, in developing and participating in TopEndSTS, we all share a commitment to supporting research work and conversations around relational, and engaged, STS research practice.

Fig. 2 Water work with Traditional Owners and hydrogeologists at Nilatjirriwa, waterhole on Milingimbi Island, East Arnhem Land.

STS is far from mainstream in northern Australian research circles; however, as a group we are fortunate to be part of a rich and unique legacy of STS scholarship, with its origins embedded in collaborative practice between researchers and Yolngu and other Aboriginal elders and knowledge authorities. The STS we undertake at Charles Darwin University remains strongly connected to Helen Verran’s (2018) concerns with ’how differences are generated in humans going-on together’. These concerns began in her time in Nigeria and were consolidated in her work in Arnhem Land in the 1980s. Back then, participating in a policy era focused around self-determination and bilingual education for Aboriginal Australians, Helen’s work was carried out under the guidance of Yolngu Aboriginal elders, and involved careful negotiation of the knowledge practices mobilised in education curricula and the teaching of maths in high school classrooms. This acted as an antidote to the assumed superiority of non-Indigenous students and Western knowledge and became fundamental to the philosophy and knowledge making practice of the Yirrkala Community Education Centre in Yirrkala.

These early beginnings, and long-term collaboration with Michael Christie, led to the development of a vibrant research and consultancy practice at CDU (see Yolngu Aboriginal Consultants Initiative and GroundUp). This research continues to mobilise the same philosophy of pragmatic, ground-up knowledge production and agreement making which can be seen as connecting with Yolngu Indigenous metaphysics and forms of pragmatism present in the Western tradition (Verran and Christie, 2011). Today, working across the Northern Territory, TopEndSTS scholars and post-graduate students are continuing to find careful and collaborative ways of navigating the complex institutional landscapes of the region. Our work includes: developing institutional practices within and beyond the university which support collaborative knowledge work (see for example, Yolngu Research@CDU and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages); cultivating design-oriented approaches for infrastructures of policy evaluation (see for example, Remote Engagement and Coordination – Indigenous Evaluation Research); and problematising received concepts of land and sea ownership, climate adaptation, economic development, language and education as these concepts configure emerging realities in more or less colonial ways (see for example, Disaster Resilience Management in Aboriginal Communities in Darwin and Cross-Cultural Management of Freshwater on Resource-Constrained Islands).

Fig. 3 & 4 Collaborative design of approaches for evaluating government policy practices in Ngukurr in South-East Arnhem Land and at Charles Darwin University in Darwin.

We now recognise such work as characterising TopEndSTS and see our work as inhabiting a range of settings and situations in the collective life of northern Australia and beyond. We are developing scholarship within complex nodes of cultural, social and economic practice in which the local, the national and the global entwine in unique ways. This work, mostly funded by government and non-government organisations interested in doing their work differently, centres on issues of current concern in the ongoing interactions between Aboriginal people and their places and communities, and the non-Indigenous organisations and agencies with which they engage.

Our scholarship takes seriously a metaphysics of emergence where new and unique worlds and ways appear in careful collaborations and practices in place. This provides the core metaphysical commitment of all this work. In our approach, received categories and practices continue to be transformed, engaging particular Indigenous approaches to knowledge production in the doing of a contemporary northern Australian STS. In our day-to-day work, the TopEndSTS group does our best to inhabit an epistemic landscape which could be considered merely an argument (Deleuze, 1994; Whitehead, 1978), but which our research inhabits as an actively embodied collective form of life as we, explicitly and in good-faith, mutually articulate our differences as we go on together doing those differences.

Spurred on by the EASST2018 and 4S Conferences, TopEndSTS is now hoping to become a vibrant, generative hub of shared ideas and collaborations. To help strengthen our understanding of what it means to do STS and to bring our team together, we convene a fortnightly workshop to discuss classic and contemporary STS texts, as well as creating opportunities to share our own writings for mutual encouragement. In 2019, we are planning an STS seminar series and online Cosmopolitics colloquium to share more of our own research and hear from others working in the field. We offer an open invitation to visiting scholars to connect with us. We particularly welcome Indigenous speakers to share their own experiences and ideas, and to invite collaborations and generative knowledge practices. Living and working as STS scholar-practitioners in northern Australia means that we cannot just recognise the presence of multiplicity in knowledge practices, but also need to learn to work with this multiplicity in engaged and productive ways. We are always exploring ways that ’difference can be done differently’, and we look forward to sharing our stories and making a unique and valuable contribution to the STS conversations and debates as our work continues.

References

Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton (trans), London: The Athlone Press

Verran, Helen (2018) Doing Difference Differently: Deakin STS in the late 1980s. Accessible at: http://stsinfrastructures.org/content/helen-verran-doing-difference-differently-deakin-sts-late-1980s

Verran, Helen, & Christie, Michael (2011). ‘Doing Difference Together Towards a Dialogue with Aboriginal Knowledge Authorities through an Australian Comparative Empirical Philosophical Inquiry’ in Culture and Dialogue, 1(2), 21-36.

Whitehead, Alfred North (1978) Process and Reality, David Ray Griffin and Donald W Sherburne (eds), NY: The Free Press

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