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, 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 . 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 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. She first joined the CSIRO, before moving to the Australian National University where she worked on making photosynthesis more efficient. In 2015, she decided it was time to explore what the world outside academia had to offer. She is now an evaluator for the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR). Anne-Sophie is passionate about making science a better, fairer, more balanced place. She is the founder of the League of Remarkable Women in Science, an interview project featuring female scientists working in all areas of STEM, aiming at giving role models to the next generation of female scientists. She is currently working on an e-book collating the interviews of 40 Remarkable Women in Australian Science, and is also the chair of the National Science Week committee for ACT. 4 Presentations South Sea Wonders: Indonesia, The Science of Sex and the Malleable Self Benjamin Hegarty PhD Student, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU In 1910 Magnus Hirschfield, the German founder of the discipline of sexology and author of pioneering book The Transvestites, conducted research in Java and Bali. Observations of diverse forms of gender and sexuality in these locations supported his early calls for a new science of sex. For over a century, the erotics of sex in the south seas has captivated the Western imagination, fuelling scientific and popular fantasies alike. More recently, Mark Johnson (1997, 37) has argued that there are “other histories of sexuality/gender” in postcolonial Southeast Asia. I ask whether the science of sex itself has “other histories.” I draw on research about the modern history of transgender in Indonesia to explore the genealogy of the science of sex. I do so by thinking through the transnational dimensions of this scientific endeavor during the Cold War. I trace an Indonesian discourse of scientific knowledge about sex that emerged from the 1960s onwards. This history offers insights into the promulgation of a liberal vision that relied on scientific theories of the self as made up of a malleable sex, gender and sexuality. I trace how this scientific vision travelled transnationally. This illuminates the relationship between sex and the capitalist political economy that crystalised post-WWII, offering new insights into the globalisation of science/technology. I draw on recent critical literature from transgender studies in conversation with empirical data to argue that the science of sex is based on the wonder inspired by racial Western fantasies about the cultures of the south seas. Benjamin Hegarty is a doctoral candidate in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. His dissertation combines archival and ethnographic research to explore transformations of queer and transgender intimacy from the 1970s to the 1990s in Indonesia. He does so to unpack their relationship to political economy, especially the role of the market in everyday life during this period. His major interest is diverse forms of embodiment as located within wider structural arrangements. His research interests political economy, gender/sexuality, biopolitics, transgender studies, medical humanities, queer, affect theory. The Wonders of Decomposition: Forensic Science and the (En)gendering of Organic Matter Dr Trang Ta Lecturer, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU Decomposition is complex and smelly. Forensic scientists engaged in taphonomic research study how the process of decomposition itself is highly variable due to the permutation of scenarios and ecosystems in existence. Indoors or outdoors, terrestrial or aquatic, mass burial or single burial, clothed or naked, the distinctive flora and fauna in the area, and the seasonal temperature all affect decomposition. Thus, pinpointing time since death is elusive. This makes identification of a decomposing human body challenging depending on the stage of decomposition and location upon discovery. In odour, physical characteristics, and even DNA, decomposition erodes traces of socially imprinted identification and the uniqueness of the individual genetic material transforming the body into generic organic matter. For example, the unique odour profile acquired over the lifetime of a living human dissipates as gases from the decomposing body cluster into common chemical compounds that are found in all decomposing bodies. Yet, the distinctive odour of decomposition (both ephemeral and enveloping) is highly important in detection of decaying bodies in the environment. This essay examines how odour pervades the work of forensic researchers as they explore the revelatory and olfactory wonders of decay. Trang Ta is a researcher and lecturer in medical anthropology and Convenor of the MA Program in Culture, Health, and Medicine at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. Witches and Wonder: Turning to Science for Plausible Explication Dr Katherine Lepani Senior Research Associate, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU Unanticipated ethnographic encounters with supernatural phenomena represent unsettling yet exciting possibilities for mutual understanding of the multivalence of world making. To what knowledge systems does one turn to explain and legitimate these unforeseen and intimate interactions, to give definitive shape to ‘that which appears’ in moments of phenomenological fear and wonder? How might the fields of biogenetics and neuroscience—the biology of the imagination—open up new ways to explore sociological questions about ‘belief systems’ in which the amorphous realm of witchcraft wields tremendous powers of agency, persuasion, and causality? These questions persist in my mind as I grapple with memories of personal encounters with witches in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. In this paper, I revisit some of these moments as a way to validate my own subjective experience in relation to the objectivity of academic research. Moreover, I wish to recuperate a place of wonder in the sociological analysis of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery in PNG, which recently has assumed an urgent policy focus in the context of heightened gender violence, accusations, torture, and killings in some parts of the country. The matrilineal Trobriands, along with most other island groups in Milne Bay, represent a sharp contrast to this disturbing trend of social

5 discord and brutality, even as this cultural region has elaborate ontological articulations of the supernatural world. Rather than dismissing beliefs in witchcraft with scientific rationalism, I seek questions from science for what might be revealed about the spiritual imaginings and makings of the social world. Katherine Lepani is an anthropologist and senior research associate with Professor Margaret Jolly’s Laureate Project in the School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. Her research explores questions of gender, personhood, and the emergence of modern individualism in relation to biomedical systems of health. She developed and taught the qualitative research methodologies course for the Master of Culture, Health, and Medicine and Master of Public Health programs at ANU. Her book Islands of Love, Islands of Risk: Culture and HIV in the Trobriands (Vanderbilt University Press, 2012) is the first full-length ethnography that examines the interface between biomedical and cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and HIV in a Melanesian context. Numerical Correspondence and the History of the World in Malaita, Solomon Islands Dr Jaap Timmer Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University Some early Greek philosophers like Pythagoras believed that mathematical concepts have greater actuality and are easier to regulate than physical ones. They believed that everything had numerical relationships and that it was worthwhile to explore the secrets of these relationships. Some thought that these relationships could only be revealed by divine grace, others began to approach this wonder scientifically. Up until today, numerology and other forms of numerical correspondence fascinate people, in particular in relation to divinatory arts. Also in contemporary Malaita, Solomon Islands, people wonder about numerical correspondence. In this paper I will explore a number of cases from Malaita in which numerical correspondence gives foundation to a unifying history of the world and of Malaita. I will show how the wonder of numerical correspondence between Malaitan realities and Western historiography uncovers an unlikely, hidden, amazing, and a particularly gendered ontology. Jaap Timmer has a broad regional interest in the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia. His current anthropological research focuses on the cultural politics of knowledge with particular emphasis on religion and state-building from the perspective of local communities. Science, Wonder and Ambivalence Dr Saskia Beudel Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Sydney College Of The Arts, University of Sydney My attention was first drawn to the category of ‘wonder’ when researching an article on Olive Pink’s Australian Arid Regions Flora Reserve (established 1956). Pink was an anthropologist, horticulturalist, botanical artist and activist for Aboriginal rights. Her letters frequently mention a sense of wonder at indigenous Australian desert flora while simultaneously expressing wariness of ‘official scientific’ botanical knowledge systems. Her own interests were more ethno-botanical than strictly botanical. Nevertheless, during the development of her reserve, she actively sought advice from scientists while remaining critical of the limitations of their expertise. Despite this ambivalence, or perhaps because of it, she established a reserve that was innovative and ahead of its times in terms of both garden histories and histories of horticultural science. I am now beginning research into Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring (1963), which is often credited with the beginnings of the ‘environmentalist movement’ and selected as one of the most influential works of nonfiction of the twentieth century. Carson had a Masters degree in biology, but was unable to pursue a PhD due to financial pressures. She had no university affiliation at a time when only one percent of tenured scientists in America were women (Nixon; Lear). A large part of her salaried career was spent in public science writing as an aquatic biologist for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Carson’s earlier works, including the bestselling The Sea Around Us (1951), celebrated marine life and integrated literary and seriously scientific writing. In Silent Spring, she traded her ‘lyrical voice’ (Nixon) for a dystopian and powerful critique of mid-century scientific developments (chemical pesticides), their entanglements with industry and their capacity to damage the natural world. Both Pink and Carson shared an extra-institutional status that made them vulnerable to attack for ‘emotionalism’ and lack of professional authority while at the same time leaving them free to set their own research agendas. How did wonder and an ambivalent view of science—both admiring and critical—shape their unique contributions? Saskia Beudel is a writer and interdisciplinary researcher. She has published on histories of anthropology, science and environment; public art and urban sustainability; and connections between public and private histories. She has particular interests in cross-cultural understandings of place; the interrelationship between narrative, place and memory; and new forms of writing. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney. Her books include Curating Sydney: Imagining the City’s Future (with Jill Bennett; UNSWP, 2014), A Country in Mind (UWAP, 2013) and Borrowed Eyes (Picador, 2002). A book chapter is forthcoming in Expeditionary Anthropology (Berghahn). Aristotle’s monster: How the Aristotelian View of Women and Disabilities has Haunted Science Vanessa de Kauwe PhD Student, Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, ANU

6 For millennia Aristotle has been considered a pre-eminent influencer of western thought, not simply as a philosopher but also as a predecessor of science, given both the detail and extent of his logical, rational extrapolations based on observations of the world around him. He has also been regarded as highly sexist, based on his dubious reasoning regarding sexual reproduction. Much literature exists which discusses the content, context and extent of Aristotle’s views on women. In this paper I will briefly explain these views. I do so with the intent of showing that these views have not only been detrimental to women, but that they have ill-affected the trajectory of western thought and science themselves. Specifically, I will explain how Aristotle came to the conclusion that women are the foremost error and monstrosity of nature, and in doing so created a link between the female and the disabled. I will then provide evidence of this idea re-emerging throughout important points in western history, such as the foundations of universities and higher education in Europe, the early years of the Royal Society and some aspects of religious law. Finally I suggest then when we encounter similar biases today, we necessarily encounter a stifling of science, wonder and thought in general. Vanessa de Kauwe has a background in Ancient Greek philosophy and ethics. Her current postgraduate research seeks to develop and evaluate science-based programs for people with intellectual disabilities, in order to further integrate them into the wider community. (Wo)man the hunter: the role of gender in the archaeological record Rebecca K Jones PhD Student, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU The last couple of decades have seen significant change in the perception of gender in archaeology, with many researchers at least wary of making stereotypical gender assumptions. Previously, models of ‘Man the Hunter’ and the largely absent ‘Woman the Gatherer’ dominated the archaeology of hunter-gatherer groups. Yet, the exploration of gender is difficult in archaeology, particularly in prehistoric societies where little is known about perception, definition and embodiment of gender roles (Hamilakis 2003). Hunter-gatherer groups and the transition from foraging to agriculture/domestication is frequently discussed in broad evolutionary trends with gender roles assumed rather than examined (Russell 2012; Peterson 2010). Subsistence activities are often artificially divided into monolithic and discrete tasks: hunting / gathering / farming / butchery / cooking. In particular, the definition of hunting is an incredibly restricted one; it has to involve direct, premeditated violence with a wild animal at the hunter’s initiative (Cartmill 1993: 29-30). If it does not meet these criteria it is termed something else: fishing, trapping, slaughter, sacrifice, road kill. Such a pointed definition suggests “a gender-valued distinction, rather than a designation of a particular kind of activity” (Cucchiari 1981: 42). Women often ‘hunt’ small animals but this is always designated as foraging (Cucchiari 1981: 42). Gender assumptions are not without merit, as in many societies the division of subsistence is gendered and men frequently are the ‘hunters’. But to what extent can we extrapolate this onto the past? And if gender divisions exist, how do we recognise them in the archaeological record? Rebecca K Jones is a current PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology in CASS. Her research focuses on two Neolithic cemetery sites in northern Vietnam. She is attempting to understand the society and major transitions during this period through zooarchaeology, the study of animal bones. Gendering the Cosmos: The Poetics and Pragmatics of Science Dr Rachel Morgain Visiting Fellow, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU This paper will explore the poetics and pragmatics of scientific imagining of our cosmos, through examining the recent global exercise in naming the planets humans have discovered outside of our solar system. Discussions on gender equity in science continue to focus heavily on institutional and cultural factors within science practice, and on how gendered preferences in a given social context feed into aspirations for science careers. In astronomy, such concerns about the daily reality of practicing science as women has recently erupted in revelations regarding (until recently) unchecked harassment by several prominent male scientists. Yet, as critical feminist engagements with science have shown, scientific imaginaries are themselves inflected with gender, which in turn shapes how gender is ‘naturalised’ in our wider social world. While much critical science studies has focused on the biological and medical sciences and biotechnology, similar dynamics of gendered imaginings of the natural world can also be found throughout the physical sciences, with powerful implications for scientific wonderment and for the social meanings of science, gender and wonder. This paper will explore how exercises in astronomical mapping gender our cosmos, as well as illuminating some subterranean counter-possibilities evoked in the poetry of cosmology. Thus this paper seeks to draw together sociological theories of gender equity in science with feminist critiques drawn from critical science and technology studies, to examine how gender shapes our imagining of the cosmos, and to draw out the implications of this for understanding the meanings of scientific imaginaries in our wider social lives. Rachel Morgain is an anthropologist who has worked since 2011 as an ARC Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow on Professor Margaret Jolly’s ‘Engendering Persons, Transforming Things’ Laureate project. She has a background in physics and astronomy, and has recently started working on the Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) project. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.

7 Workshops

11.30am Thursday 11th February Panel: Science, wonder and equity

Convener: Dr Rachel Morgain Gender Equity in Science Panellists: Sam Cheah Engineer and Founder of ‘Engage’ outreach program for Engineering in Schools. Dr Sean Perera Lecturer and the International Programs Convener at the ANU Centre for the Public Awareness of Science and Founder of ‘Opening Doors’ Program aimed at increasing access to science among marginalised immigrants. And more (TBC)

2pm Friday 12th February

Robogals workshop Robogals is a student-run organisation that aims to engage schoolgirls in engineering topics from a young age, with the long-term goal of increasing female enrolment in engineering, science and technology courses at universities. At this workshop, we will be learning about LEGO robotics from a team of Robogals experts!

The workshop will be followed by a Q&A with Robogals volunteers about their outreach getting young women and girls excited about engineering, science and technology.

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