In June 2021, more than 180 early-career Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars and participants congregated at this year’s Australasian STS Graduate Network Conference (henceforth AusSTS2021) to reflect on the theme of “situated practice.” The third event since the network was founded in 2017, this year’s multi-sited gathering comprised local nodes in the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Darwin, …
Tag Archives: Australia
The life of the coral body
This article is part of the series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
Life comes apart on the reef. Changes to ocean chemistry and temperature—generated by the fossil-hunger of militarism, extractivism, and industrialism—break open coral worlds on Australia’s northeast coast. Encountering death’s ascendency on the Great Barrier Reef, scientists seek to track coral life by descending within: to study limestone structures, the tiny polyps that build them, and the microscopic symbiotic algae that …
Seeking Urban Metabolisms through Archaeology
This article is part of the series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
The metabolism of a city is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in its archaeology. Decades of excavations triggered by cultural heritage management legislation in Melbourne, Australia reveal a city honeycombed with rubbish pits. Disused cesspits (old-fashioned long-drop toilets), purpose-dug holes and localised dumps filled to the brim with rubbish remain below the factories, office buildings and car parks we see …
Social Soils and Chimerical Metabolisms
This article is part of the series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
The metabolic rift
“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil,” Marx (1976: 637-38) wrote in Volume I of Capital. For Marx, not only was the capitalist mode of production incapable of valuing nature in its own right, but its central contradictions also left it …
Feeble-mindedness, depression and obesity: a brief history of eugenics and dietary interventions in Australia
This article is part of the series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
In October 2019 the Australian Productivity Commission (APC) released a report stating that mental health cost employers $4.7 billion AUD in absenteeism. The report also highlighted significant government expenditure on health services as well as intangible costs on committees. Over the past decade there have also been a number of reports from federal and state governments on the economic and …
How do you do interdisciplinarity?
The AusSTS Interdisciplinary workshop took place at Deakin University, in Melbourne, Australia from the 3rd to the 5th of July 2019.
The workshop quite literally started with a confession of the feeling of insecurity that surfaces when you step into an interdisciplinary setting. Cordelia Fine, opening Keynote of the 3-day workshop, began her lecture ‘50 Shades of Grey …