AUS STS Keynote with Helen Verran “Australian Territorialisms”

About event

Livestream of "Australian Territorialisms and their Sovereignties: An STS reading of some contemporary Australian knowledge institutions"

The AUS STS (Australasian Science and Technnologies Studies) 2024 conference keynote will be delivered by Professor Helen Verran ( Charles Darwin University). Please join us for this Livestream of the keynote address and Q and A.

The conference is themed “(De-)Territorialising STS: Discipline, Place, Power” and will take place between the18th and 20th November, 2024 at the Austalian National University. This is the only online component of an otherwise in-person event. You can learn more about the conference here.

Australian Territorialisms and their Sovereignties: An STS reading of some contemporary Australian knowledge institutions

Abstract

Performativity as a novel expression of empiricism was a hot topic in 1990s STS. In this keynote address I set out to revive the conversation in the context of contemporary Australian knowledge institutions. I propose scholars need to privilege epistemic performativity over representationism when it comes to framing our inquiries. The lecture will begin by telling a story of present-day Australia as a multiplicity of polities expressing incommensurable territorialisms and associated sovereignties. In segueing to asking what a practitioner of scholarly STS might make of this situation, I will briefly consider: could this ‘story’ of multiple Australian territorialisms and sovereignties better be thought of as ‘a theory’? What does it mean for an STS scholar to claim to ‘tell a story’, rather than ‘propose a theory’? Is this just another retrograde move showing ours as ‘a post-truth era’? I will claim, on the contrary, that it expresses a conviction that ours is an era of ‘more than truth’, or ‘not only truth’. In the interests of avoiding epistemic bad faith and casual enactment of epistemic injustice, it is crucial to explicitly recognise and nurture the ongoing collective epistemic work involved in such going on together doing differences, and knowledge institutions are the appropriate sites for such work.

About Helen Verran

Helen Verran currently holds the position of Professorial Research Fellow in the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University. Her involvement with Australian science and technology studies began when she was offered a visiting fellowship in the Science Studies Programme by the Deakin University School of Humanities in the late 1980s. This was followed by nearly 25 years of teaching at the University of Melbourne as lecturer in history and philosophy of science. Retiring from that position in 2012, she took up her current position. Across that time span Professor Verran inquired into engagements between disparate epistemic traditions. This began in Nigerian schools in 1980s and continued as she became involved in the workings of northern Australian organisations, both Indigenous and settler. In the international STS arena Professor Verran has served on the 4S Council, been awarded the 4S Fleck Prize, and contributed as book reviews editor of the Journal Science and Technology in Society. The ‘Ground UP’ research program that she was instrumental in initiating at Charles Darwin University has been active in contributing to strengthening of the ‘Making and Doing STS’ strand of performative STS scholarship.

This keynote is supported by Deakin’s Science and Society Network (SSN), the journal ‘Science, Technology and Human Values’ and the ANU’s Research School of Social Sciences. To take part in the Q and A, please login to YouTube with a Google account.