AusSTS 2025 Day 3 Keynote “Bodies of signal and noise”

About event

Join AusSTS online for the final keynote of 'Signals and Noises 2025' with Warwick Anderson, Kari Lancaster and Christopher O' Neill.

Join the final keynote of the 2025 AusSTS “Signals and Noises” conference via Livestream. We will be closing out the keynote series with Professor Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney), Professor Kari Lancaster (University of Bath) and Dr Christopher O’Neill (Deakin University), chaired by Associate Professor Timothy Neale.

Our thanks to Julia Trybala for her permission to reproduce her artwork “More space than is given” in the banner above.

To take part in the Livestream chat, please sign in with a Google/ YouTube account. Join the coversation on BlueSky with #signalsandnoises and #AusSTS25.Please note that the AusSTS conference is full, and this free livestream is for online users only.

Bodies of signal and noise

In his 1966 essay “Message or Noise?,” recently translated into English, Michel Foucault engages in a critique of the medical sciences’ treatment of human bodies. Their practitioners utilise epistemological tools and habits that seek the message or signal of disease and symptom in the tumult of organic bodies. Doctors, Foucault writes, close their ears “to all that which is not an element of the message.” This plenary will provide an opportunity for different critical reflections on technoscience and its entanglements with human, nonhuman and more-than-human bodies, focusing in particular on how these bodies are encountered (or not) as noisy and sites of epistemological practice and meaning.

Speaker Bios

Professor Warwick Anderson is Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Discipline of Anthropology and the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney. He was formerly an ARC Laureate Fellow in the History Department at Sydney. Additionally, he is an honorary professor in the Centre for Health Equity (which he founded) in the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. A co-conspirator in postcolonial studies of science, he has written extensively on science, race, and colonialism; medicine and white masculinity; kuru, cannibalism, and sorcerer scientists; and autoimmunity and tolerance of self. His current research is focused on disease ecology and planetary health. In 2023, he was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, in recognition of lifetime achievement in science and technology studies.

Professor Kari Lancaster is Professor in Social Studies of Science and Health, in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, at the University of Bath, and Honorary Burnet Institute Senior Principal Fellow. Informed by STS, health sociology, and policy studies, her work focuses on the critical social study of evidence-making practices and intervention translations in health, especially in relation to drugs and infectious disease. Her current work explores the relations between science, policy, evidence, and intervention amidst transformative global changes affecting health, with a focus on outbreak and viral elimination. Kari is a member of the Editorial Collective of Science, Technology & Human Values.

Dr Christopher O’Neill is a Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, where he studies the role of automation in contemporary biopower. He is also a 2025-2026 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Southern California, studying ‘error’ as a problematic for the automated workplace. He is currently working on two monographs – one a genealogy of the body in the ‘sensor society’, and another on the biopolitical stakes of facial recognition technologies.

Chair bio

Timothy Neale is a pakeha (settler) academic from Aotearoa New Zealand living and working in Melbourne/Naarm where he works as an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Deakin University. An STS scholar and anthropologist interested in humans’ effort to know and control environments, he is also an Editor (2022-2028) of the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values.

About the artwork

‘More Space that is given’ formed part of an exhibition titled ‘Hold a body together’ by Julia Trybala at the Station Gallery in 2021. Julia Trybala centres her work on people and relationships, drawing inspiration from personal experience and conversations with friends and family.

In this vein, Hold a body together explores the links between grief, routine and ritual, the body and ecology, labour and ties to the mother. The works in this exhibition were made in response to the artist’s friend Chelsea Hart’s (unpublished) book of poetry Petal, written while processing the sudden passing of her mother. In the introduction, Hart writes: “This little book contains lessons and understandings that emerged for me in grief – of the body and its entanglements, the way it responds, moves and is altered when someone leaves the earth.”

Our sponsors

Signals & Noises is sponsored by ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S); National Museum of Communication, Deakin Science and Society Network and Science, Technology, & Human Values. Deakin University is hosting us at Deakin Downtown.