Gender, Science and Wonder A postgraduate workshop sponsored by the ANU Gender Institute PROGRAM 11-12th February 2016 Seminar Room 1 Australian Centre on China in the World Australian National University Inquiries: Dr Rachel Morgain, [email protected], School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific Dr Trang Ta, [email protected], School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Arts and Social Sciences 1 Schedule Thursday 11th February 9.30am Welcome 10-11am Opening keynote: Professor Catherine Waldby, Director, RSSS, ANU The Duration of Fertility: oocytes, reproduction and deep time MorninG tea 11.30am- Panel discussion: Science, wonder and equity 12.30pm Sam Cheah (Founder ‘Engage’), Dr Sean Perera (Founder ‘OpeninG Doors’), and more Lunch 1.30-2.30pm The science and wonder of sex and the body Benjamin HeGarty, School of Archaeology and AnthropoloGy, ANU South Sea Wonders: Indonesia, the Science of Sex and the Malleable Self Trang Ta, School of ArchaeoloGy and AnthropoloGy, ANU The Wondrous Odour of Decomposition: Forensic Science and the (En)gendering of Organic Matter Afternoon tea 3pm-4pm Science, wondering ontologies and Pacific socialities Katherine Lepani, School of Culture, History and LanGuaGe, ANU Witches And Wonder: Turning to Science for Plausible Explication Jaap Timmer, Department of AnthropoloGy, ANU Numerical Correspondence and the History of the World in Malaita, Solomon Islands 5.30-7pm PuBlic keynote lecture: Dr Astrida Neimanis, University of Sydney Fishy Beginnings (We Are All Bodies of Water) Friday 12th February 9.30- Keynote presentation: Dr Anne-Sophie Dielen, BioloGist and Founder of the LeaGue of 10.30am Remarkable Women in Science The good, the bad and the wonder. Being a woman in Australian science MorninG tea 11am-12pm Outsiders: wonder and ambiguity in science Saskia Beudel Science, Wonder and Ambivalence Vanessa de Kauwe Aristotle’s Monster: How the Aristotelian View of Women and Disabilities has Haunted Science 12-1pm Gendered imaginings and scientific practice Rebecca K Jones (Wo)man the hunter: the role of gender in the archaeological record Rachel MorGain Gendering the Cosmos: The Poetics and Pragmatics of Science Lunch 2-4pm RoBogals workshop – engineers teach us to make LEGO roBots! Followed by Q&A with Robogals about their outreach work gettinG young women and girls excited about engineering, science and technology. Afternoon tea 2 Keynote presentations Public lecture 5.30-7pm Thursday 11th February Fishy Beginnings (We Are All Bodies of Water) Dr Astrida Neimanis Discussant: Professor Margaret Jolly We are rather fishy, we humans. RiGht back to the first siGns of life on earth at least 3.9 billion years aGo, when small orGanic proteins likely interacted with their habitat to produce the first bacterial life forms, water has been necessary for the Gestation of all livinG beinGs. Our earliest ancestors were all apparently water babies, squirminG, scuttlinG or swimminG around their respective watery worlds. DrawinG on feminist theory, phenomenoloGy, evolutionary bioloGy, and some other queer tales of obstinate lungfish, nostalGic whales and aquatic apes, I am compelled to ask: how is my body an archive of these other watery bodies, anticipatinG aqueous paths not taken and rememberinG wet futures yet to come? These speculations are more than mere metaphor; they demonstrate the need for more audacious imaGinaries in the context of our planet’s current growing water crises. Experiencing ourselves as bodies of water, deeply indebted to the watery milieus which bathed us all into beinG, is an ethical call from the deep. Dr Astrida Neimanis joined the Gender and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Sydney in 2015 after holdinG various teaching and research positions at universities in Canada, the UK, and Sweden. She is Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press), a Key Researcher with the Sydney Environment Institute and co-convenor of the CompostinG: Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities readinG Group hosted at the University of Sydney. She is also a foundinG member and University of Sydney contact faculty for The Seed Box: A MISTRA-FORMAS Environmental Humanities Collaboratory (a transnational research consortium based at LinkopinG University, Sweden). Her work connects feminist theory to water, weather, bodies, and other environmental matters. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenologies is forthcominG in 2016 (Bloomsbury). Professor Margaret Jolly is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor in the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She is an historical anthropoloGist who has written extensively on Gender in the Pacific, on exploratory voyaGes and travel writing, missions and contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema and art. She chairs the ECOPAS Committee on Climate ChanGe, a European Union- funded consortium aiminG to put the ‘human’ back into climate chanGe in the Pacific. Her recent work includes research into deep time and the Gendering of climate change in Oceania. 3 10-11am Thursday 11th February The Duration of Fertility: oocytes, reproduction and deep time Professor Catherine Waldby In popular culture, oocytes (eGGs) are bioloGical clocks. Women in the post-industrial democracies are confronted again and again with the irreversible ticking away of their fertility, instructed in the women’s health and lifestyle media to seize the day and conceive before the ticking falls silent. In the interviews I conducted for this study, finite clock time is the salient temporal experience of fertile time for women. The idiom of the bioloGical clock expresses an important aspect of fertile time - its finite horizon, its movement towards a vanishinG point midway throuGh the lifetime of women in the developed world. However it also conveys a thin sense of the thick time invested in oocyte bioloGy. It foreGrounds the most familiar, everyday sense of time, linear, consecutive, regular, a predictable mechanism that moves forward, each discrete point in time supersedinG the last. The ubiquity of clocks in everyday life means that this sense of time is ready to hand. The tickinG clock expresses a certain experience of time as constantly lost, wasted, dissipated, not to be regained. Yet this quite particular orGanisation of everyday time – into minute, reGular, passinG increments – is rarely adequate to the experience of the life course. Nor can it encompass the nature of bioloGical time, the multiple, stochastic temporalities of living process. So rather than treat bioloGical clock time as descriptive, in what follows I want to unpack some of the complex temporal investments and capacities of the oocyte, and begin to think about how these capacities shape women’s experience of their location in generational time, the time of successive lifetimes. While this is experienced larGely in terms of kinship, the relations between co-existing Generations, it also points beyond it to what Astrida Neimanis terms ‘thick time’, a sense of time that includes and accounts for the deep past and indicates the deep future. Professor Catherine WaldBy is Director of the Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University, and VisitinG Professor at the Department of Social Science and Medicine at King’s College London. Her researches focuses on social studies of biomedicine and the life sciences. Her recent books include The Global Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Science: Regenerative Medicine in Transition, (with Herbert Gottweis and Brian Salter, PalGrave 2009) and Clinical Labour: Tissue donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (with Melinda Cooper, Duke University Press 2014). With Nikolas Rose and Ilina Singh, she is the editor of BioSocieties: an interdisciplinary journal for the social studies of life sciences. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a member of the History and Philosophy committee of the Academy of Science. She has received national and international research grants for her work on stem cells, blood donation and biobanking. 9.30-10.30am Friday 12th February The good, the bad and the wonder. Being a woman in Australian science. Dr Anne-Sophie Dielen We mostly talk numbers when it comes to Gender in science. However, if numbers are crucial, they can be hard to relate to. Numbers used to describe the issues and hurdles facing women in Australian science are also quite often disheartening. Numbers, however critical, are sometimes not enough. Sometimes, stories are the way that leads to changes. So instead of numbers, I will share stories. Stories I collected in 2015 conducting interviews of women working in all areas of Science, TechnoloGy, Engineering and Maths (STEM). Interviewees talked about the reasons why they studied science, the excitement and wonders of beinG a scientist but also the hurdles they faced alonG the way. ToGether, these stories can be seen as a snapshot of what it means to be a woman in Australian science in 2016. These collective experiences share the journey of remarkable women with a passion for science and a will to change the world. They are ongoing memories and experiences from women shapinG the future of science and society. Every one of these shared experiences will describe the Good, the bad and the wonder of being a woman in Australian science. From these shared experiences, I will propose ideas and solutions about what we can do for the next generation of women in science. As scientists, parents, educators, friends and mentors, we all have a role to play to make science a better, fairer, safer, more welcoming place. Dr Anne-Sophie Dielen grew up listening to her grandparents’ stories about their life as small holder farmers in the North East of France. She strongly believes this is why she developed a passion for plants, agriculture and stories. Having always dreamed about Australia, she came to Canberra after her PhD in plant virology.