Dyason Lecture 2018 by Professor Helen Verran: Dancing with Strangers: Imagining an Originary Moment for Australian STS

Session Submission Type: Special Event

Abstract

Helen Verran will be presenting the distinguished plenary lecture for the Australasian Association for History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (AAHPSSS).

In 1788 in what would in a few years become Sydney, not too far from the site where in 2018 a large group of scholars will meet to critically discuss the roles of sciences and technologies in modern cultures and societies, a group of sailors and soldiers danced with the strangers who had been warily awaiting them when they arrived on shore. Science and technology had also arrived, albeit to an extent unheralded. Of course, the strangers who at first hesitantly welcomed the group they assumed were mere temporary visitors, had their own highly elaborated traditions of knowing and doing that could with careful translation also have been understood as sciences and technologies. It is recorded in the colonial archive that as a start to that translation work, the two groups danced together. Each presumably also showed the other how to dance ‘properly’. In this lecture I take this promising moment in which knowers in disparate traditions engaged each other with curiosity and respect, as occasion to articulate (another) originary moment in Australian STS.

Reception: 6pm
Lecture: 6:30pm

Sub Unit

• Single Paper Submission

Session Organizer

• Helen Verran, Charles Darwin University, Casurina, NT