AusSTS2021 Keynote presentations

TopEndSTS invites local scholars and interested parties to join us in watching online presentations from AusSTS 2021: Situated Practice – A multi-sited workshop  #AusSTS2021

We will gather at CDU Casuarina Campus on two mornings, followed by morning tea and time for discussion and networking.

Join for one or both events.

Thursday 25 June, 9.00 – 10.30am (NT time)

Room Blue 2.1.51 – Free entry (includes morning tea)

Keynote Lecture: Professor Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto

Title: Pollution, Colonialism, and Re-imagining Chemicals

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Friday 26th June, 9:00am – 10.30am (NT time)

Room Blue 2.1.51 – Free entry (includes morning tea)

Keynote Conversation Event: Professor Kane Race, University of Sydney with Associate Professor Anne Galloway, Victoria University of Wellington

Title: Embodied engagements

(see below for abstract and details about speakers)


Keynote Lecture: Professor Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto

Title: Pollution, Colonialism, and Re-imagining Chemicals

Abstract: In communities and in universities, environmental justice projects often must mobilize scientific understandings of what chemical pollutants are and do. Yet, the technical information about what pollutants are and do is so often created by the very corporate and state actors who are most culpable for creating pollution. Based on industry produced data collected by government agencies, the ways that substances are rendered and informated fail to prevent pollution, but instead oversee a permission-to-pollute regulatory system. More than this, for Indigenous communities facing disproportionate environmental violence, pollution is an active form of settler colonialism and an expression of racial capitalism. This talk considers how we might rethink what chemical pollution is and does through epistemologies and responsibilities that better support decolonial land protection and start with the specific place-thought of the lower Great Lakes. What might a desire-based understanding of chemical pollutants look like? What core categories and concerns of environmental justice’s engagements with technoscience need to be rethought? Building from Indigenous feminisms as well as land defense around the lower Great Lakes, and with a focus on petrochemical pollution, this talk will consider how chemicals can be re-imagined with and against technoscience towards decolonial futures.

About the speaker: Michelle Murphy is a Professor in History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, where they are an STS scholar whose research concerns decolonial and feminist approaches to environmental, reproductive, and data justice. They are tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science & Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice, as well as Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit, which hosts an Indigenous-led Environmental Data Justice lab and is home for social justice approaches to Science and Technology Studies. She is the author of three books: Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, Seizing the Means of Reproduction, The Economization of Life, all published by Duke University Press. She is Métis from Winnipeg from a Métis and French Canadian family.

Watch the seminar:

The seminar will be available to stream on YouTube live. Access using the live link: https://youtu.be/4fTL-iRyM3U

Date/time: Thursday 24th June, 9:00am – 10.30am (NT Time)

Q&A with the speaker to follow. To send questions/participate in the chat, you’ll need to sign-in using a YouTube account.

The seminar will be recorded and available to watch on the SSN YouTube channel after the Livestream.


Keynote Conversation Event: Professor Kane Race, University of Sydney with Associate Professor Anne Galloway, Victoria University of Wellington

This moderated conversation event on ‘Embodied Engagements’ features two prominent STS researchers whose work uniquely engages with the workshop theme of situated practice. The discussion will touch on topics such as:

  • How we situate ourselves in relation to our objects of study
  • Methods for enacting situated practices of research
  • The role of ‘place’ in orienting research (especially in the context of the settler-colonies of Australia and Aoteroa New Zealand)
  • And how an attentiveness to ‘situatedness’ might also help us to build better practices of care

About the speakers:

Dr Kane Race is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. He began work as an HIV social scientist when combination antiretroviral therapy was introduced to treat the disease in 1996 and has explored the impact of this event on HIV prevention practices and gay culture in work spanning the fields of HIV research, sociology and queer and cultural studies. He is also interested in the politics of drugs and is the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (2009) and The Gay Science: intimate experiments with the problem of HIV (2018).

Dr Anne Galloway is Associate Professor in Design for Social Innovation and founder of the More-Than-Human Lab at Victoria University of Wellington. Anne is a multispecies anthropologist and speculative design ethnographer. Her work focusses on farmed animal life in all its complexity, and she writes and speaks regularly on human-animal relations and creative research methods. More importantly, Anne keeps a small flock of rare breed sheep that has transformed her research and everyday life in ways she never imagined.

About the chair: Dr Kiran Pienaar is a lecturer in Sociology at Deakin University, Melbourne Australia. Kiran’s work explores connections between health, gender, sexuality and the body, with a particular interest in drug consumption and sexual cultures, and the sociopolitical dimensions of health. Drawing on science and technology studies and new materialisms, she has published on topics related to drugs, addiction and the self; drug experiences in LGBTQ cultures; and public health and drug policy. She is the author of Politics in the Making of HIV/AIDS in South Africa (2016).

Watch the seminar:

The seminar will be available to stream on YouTube live. Access using the live link: https://youtu.be/IuLg-UBDWsQ

Date/time: Friday 25th June, 9:00am – 10.30am (NT time)

Q&A with the speaker to follow. To send questions/participate in the chat, you’ll need to sign-in using a YouTube account.

The seminar will be recorded and available to watch on the SSN YouTube channel after the Livestream.

If you have any questions, please send to thao.phan1@deakin.edu.au


With thanks to our event sponsors: