Indigenous epigenetics and ‘postcolonial moments’

• In Event: Political Transformations of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and Epigenetics in the Global South 1

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which DOHaD and nutritional/environmental epigenetics is mobilized in Indigenous Australian contexts. Australia, and Adelaide in particular, has had an important role to play in the historical narrative of DOHaD (through David Barker’s work), and the global scientific understanding of developmental origins and nutritional epigenetics more broadly. Applying a postcolonial lens to this science however, unsettles this narrative and produces what Verran (2002) refers to as ‘postcolonial moments’, creating space for theorizing, interrupting and redistributing power relations. Drawing on preliminary interview data on epigenetics/DOHaD and Indigeneity, I ask what happens to local knowledge practices, both ‘scientific’ and traditional’ when concepts of temporality, kinship, responsibility and relatedness meet in Indigenous and epigenetic moments? Rather than bracket these epistemological and ontological understandings, I look to the shared social imaginaries that constitute these enactments, and the complex workings of power, race and gender in these politics of particular moments.

Author

• Megan Warin, University of Adelaide