ABSTRACT  

In her book Dear Science and Other Stories (2021), Katherine McKittrick suggests that science is a kind of storytelling. Science and storytelling, she says, are typically held apart in colonial thinking, but if we imagine science as a storytelling, and storytelling as a science, then the bifurcation becomes less obvious.  This paper holds and works with entwined stories; of David Barker, the so-called ‘father’ of developmental origins of health and disease; of gendered bodies (Indigenous bodies, pregnant bodies, animals, lands and water); and the politics of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge.  Situating story-making in the politics of place and reproduction, I explore what stories, futures and materialities might be animated when colonial science and biometric knowledge systems are not reified. 

SPEAKER DETAILS 

Megan Warin is a Professor and social anthropologist at the University of Adelaide. Her ARC funded research focuses on the gendered dynamics of disordered eating, structural disadvantage and obesity, public health interventions, and the politics of gender and racism in developmental origins of health and disease and epigenetics in the context of nutritional (and other) exposures. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and an International fellow of the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity in the School of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. 

ADDITIONAL DETAILS  

Our speaker will be presenting in-person at Deakin Waterfront: AD1.122 in the Sally Walker building or you can join us via Zoom: 

https://deakin.zoom.us/j/84436200390?pwd=VjRHUVZseTMvYWcrSFFJbU1LRDcrUT09  

Meeting ID: 844 3620 0390 | please contact ciara.barker@deakin.edu.au for the password.