Helen Verran

A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners

I juxtapose a story of Aboriginal landowners demonstrating their firing strategies with a story of environmental scientists elaborating their regimes of burning. The firings are profoundly different, and maintaining those differences is crucial for both Aborigines and scientists. Yet it is also important for both these groups to develop links between the forms of firing. I argue for understanding both firing regimes as expressions of collective memory which embed evaluative witness. This sameness enables modest yet sufficient connection. Acknowledging this translating form of ‘sameness’ would have scientists and Aborigines engaging an alternative form of generalizing, promoting a transformative moment in both knowledge traditions. This alternative form of generalizing embeds a politics different from the politics embedded in orthodox scientific and Yolngu forms of generalizing. I claim the tension made in articulating these alternative forms of generalizing as a ‘postcolonial moment’.

Re-imagining land ownership in Australia

Cape York pastoralists and Aborigines have jointly called for state and federal governments to legislate 1⁄4 a form of statutory co-existence of title on pastoral leases. 1⁄4 [A] marathon seven-hour meeting in the Queensland town of Coen last week 1⁄4 sought to address the uncertainty and ® nancial dif® culties owing to Cape York pastoralists from the Wik people’ s claim to a large area of Cape York, including 12 pastoral leases.

Designing digital knowledge management tools with Aboriginal Australians

Abstract The paper describes an approach to digital design grounded in processes of Indigenous collective memory making. We claim the research should be understood as performative knowledge making, and accounting it should also be performative. Accordingly we present four texts generated in the course of our research as an exhibit. They attest design processes for a file management system TAMI. We briefly theorise our approach as exemplifying Suchman’s ‘located accountability’.

Number as an inventive frontier in knowing and working Australia’s water resources:

Taking number as material and semiotic, this article considers the enumeration of Australia’s water resources as both a form of audit and a form of marketing. It proposes that a scientific enumeration utilizes the relation one/many while an economic enumeration utilizes the relation whole/parts. Working the tension between these two forms of enumeration can be understood as an inventive frontier in contemporary Australian life.

Comparative Relativism: Symposium on an Impossibility

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Levi-Strauss’s analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison’s history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry.

Digital lives in postcolonial Aboriginal Australia

In this article, the authors relate brief stories of episodes spanning a period of 10 years when they worked with Australian Aboriginal groups and individuals as they incorporated digital technologies into their cultural practices. Their story telling is leavened with a dissonant working imaginary designed to interrupt both itself and the stories. As their stories of their digital lives proceed, however, the carefully contrived, resourceful dissonance unexpectedly recedes as the new and surprising digital lives that form part of their collectives evade the grasp of their interrupting tool.

The Telling Challenge of Africa's Economies

Abstract: This contribution to the special issue of ASR on Jane Guyers Marginal Gains (2004) takes up two recent, and radically different, constructivist contributions to the field of economic sociology—those of Phillip Mirowski and Michel Callon. The article makes use of Marginal Gains to interrogate both these analytics, asking if they can meet the challenge posed by the diversity and multiplicity of African popular economic practice.

Imagining nature politics in the era of Australia's emerging market in environmental services interventions

With the advent of environmental ‘governance by commission’, associated with evidence-based policy and market mechanisms, there is a need to (re)imagine Australias nature politics. I identify two distinct domains of nature politics – one associated with distribution of goods produced in nature, and another concerned with constituting nature itself. The paper offers two analytically distinct readings of a tender bids hearing to select a contractor to assemble a diagnostic design for a government funded project of river rehabilitation. The tool that enables these incommensurable accounts is a purposefully crafted ethnographic story of the hearing. These dual readings engage alternative framings in order to see alternative political domains. The first reading mobilises an orthodox relativising framing to show a familiar politics evident in the competition for the contract; a politics over the distribution of goods produced from nature. This can be read as a politics over valuing nature. The second reading, proposing an alternative nature politics that should be understood as sitting alongside, utilises an alternative analytic framing. It offers a reading of the tender bids hearing as a politics contesting the form of the entities that should order Australian nature. In concluding I propose that the juxtaposed alternative readings, analyses made with disparate explicit metaphysical commitments, which reveal separate but connected political domains, constitute a politics of imagination, and ask how to configure the analyst who can engage such a politics?

The changing lives of measures and values: from centre stage in the fading ‘disciplinary’ society to pervasive background instrument in the emergent ‘control’ society

This paper examines the work that measures and values do in policy in the context of an epochal change in the relations between knowledge and policy in Australia. I tell a story of successive attempts to rehabilitate a dying Australian river. The first attempt employs policy as the application of theoretically justified natural knowledge about rivers and their environs. The second attempt occurs after the evidence-based policy era has dawned in Australia. The contrast shows that measures, values and facts about the dying river justified by epistemic practices have been displaced. In an era of evidence-based policy and governance through market mechanisms, measures and values speak to policy through designs that can be bought and sold. In order to be able to better describe this shift I develop an analytic vocabulary to give an account of the intensive properties of what I call enumerated entities, and link the shift to the move from a disciplinary to a control society.

WORKING WITH THOSE WHO THINK OTHERWISE

This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensens article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science” (Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 [Spring 2014]: 337 – 62), which concerns the “postcritical” work of Helen Verran, Richard Rottenburg, and Hirokazu Miyazaki. Verrans response clarifies the stance that she takes in her work, and especially in her book Science and an African Logic (2001), toward critique. Here she argues that critique involves grasping the difference between entities in the here-and-now, while conventional analysis in the social sciences explains away difference in the here-and-now by relocating it to an ideal realm. She explains that the method she has developed is a form of infra critique — a way of “doing difference” that keeps it present, particular, and localized. Her essay concludes that the shift to infra critique requires that the “good faith analyst” make her own ontological commitments explicit and accept responsibility for making judgments.