The HPS Seminar Series

Wednesday 1 May
12pm - 1pm

Old Arts (Building 149) Room 239 (North Lecture Theatre).

After Haraway: Re-examining Feminism & Primatology in 1970s USA
 
Samara Greenwood (HPS, University of Melbourne)

A longstanding concern for philosophers, historians and sociologists of science is to assess the ways in which broad contextual changes, such as the rise of social and political movements, come to impact science. One well-known study is Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions (1989), which in part examined interactions between feminism and primatology in 20th Century USA . One of Haraway’s key claims was that second wave feminism played a pivotal role in destabilising established narratives around female primates and gender within the discipline. However, Haraway’s explicit aim was not to provide a disinterested or objective account of events but rather to playfully blend multiple genre’s, including science fiction, cultural studies, and political activism to further challenge conventional Western accounts of primates, science, and gender.
 
In re-examining this case, my purpose and approach differ. My aim is to more systematically assess the impact of second wave feminism on both the practices and products of primate science. I specifically focus on the first phase of engagement, spanning 1970 to 1975. In analysing this initial phase, I first outline primatology’s ‘research repertoire’ before the influence of feminism. I then examine interventions produced by four central feminist-scientists, reviewing the motivation, production, and reception of their work. I also demonstrate how, over time, the outcomes of their interventions lost connection to their feminist roots as they became normalised into the revised repertoire of the discipline. From this analysis, I make two key claims. First, I argue that, despite being primarily considered a social and political movement, second wave feminism’s intellectual, epistemic, and cognitive dimensions must be fully appreciated to understand its impact on primatology. Second, I contend that, contrary to expectation, there is strong empirical support for Haraway’s most controversial claim - that second wave feminism impacted primate science in more profound ways than even its central actors have claimed.

Samara Greenwood is a PhD Candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. Samara’s thesis explores the impact of changing social contexts on the practices and products of science, drawing on a range of historical case studies. Samara also co-hosts The HPS Podcast where she interviews leading scholars from around the world.
 

Wednesday 8 May
12pm - 1pm

Old Arts (Building 149) Room 239 (North Lecture Theatre).

Beyond Dichotomies: Embracing an Integrated Approach to Social Relationships

Lucia Neco (Philosophy, University of Western Australia)

If there is any hope to build a unified account of sociality that is able to describe the fundamental components of social systems—whether involving humans, non-human entities, or a combination thereof, as suggested by recent work on multispecies interactions—we need a clear concept of social relationships. For many social scientists and philosophers, social relationships are essentially mind-dependent, subjective, and restricted to human beings. They are part of a realm that is not relevantly dependent on or constrained by physical or biological properties; they are not part of the “fabric of the world.” As a consequence, they cannot be compared to the interactions of “objectively defined individuals”, such as animals, that are described as inflexible, programmed, and completely constrained by these properties. In this paper, I challenge this false dichotomy that contrasts subjectivity and objectivity, humans and nonhuman entities, and the corresponding sciences that study them—namely, the social sciences and natural sciences. I shall defend the claims that (a) social relationships are essentially constituted by (interdependent) objective and subjective components and (b) that they are not restricted to human beings. My approach avoids extreme positions by recognizing that social relationships are both facilitated and constrained by biological properties, subject to evolutionary pressures. However, they cannot be reduced to these properties as they require an active individual, an agent, who is able not only to interact but to track and respond flexibly to their interactions. By embracing an interdisciplinary and nonreductive approach to social relationships, we pave the way for a unified account of sociality that has the potential to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of social behavior. 

 Lucia is a philosopher and biologist fascinated by the philosophical underpinnings of the biological, cognitive, and social sciences, especially in the realms of social behavior and culture. She is currently the Project Coordinator and a Research Associate for the "Keeping Kinship in Mind" Project, coordinated by Prof. Rob Wilson at the University of Western Australia. Additionally, she actively contributes to the Philosophical Engagement in Public Life (PEiPL) network and engages in initiatives related to Philosophy for Children (p4c) in Perth, Australia.

Wednesday 15 May
12pm - 1pm

Old Arts (Building 149) Room 239 (North Lecture Theatre).

Title - TBC
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Cordelia Fine (HPS, University of Melbourne)​

Wednesday 22 May
12pm - 1pm

Old Arts (Building 149) Room 239 (North Lecture Theatre).

Medical Humanities x HPS ECR Panel

A ticket to colonial anthropometry: A case study of registration of prostitution and lock hospitals in the Nineteenth Century Madras
Divya Rama Gopalakrishnan (La Trobe University)

This presentation examines registration tickets which indicate the presence of anthropometric undertones in lock hospital discourse in colonial India. Throughout the nineteenth century, women suspected of practising prostitution in India were registered under a local lock hospital and given a registration ticket. These tickets on their own might seem insignificant to the arguments on lock hospitals, as indeed has been argued by historians such as Erica Wald. However, these documents give new details of the functioning lock hospital system in Madras. At first glance, the ticket's purpose seems to be record-keeping and surveillance but this paper will argue that registration tickets in lock hospitals functioned not just as tools of surveillance but also as a medium to study Indian women’s bodies and in that way highlight the presence of anthropometric undertones within lock hospital registration systems. I argue that by pointing out the physical difference between Indian and European bodies the colonial government tried to mark Indian women’s bodies as deviant and hence justify surveillance over them. However, I shall also show that this linking of physical characteristics to the moral character was not only introduced by colonialism but was already present within Indian society to categorise caste hierarchies. This physiognomic categorisation intensified in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under colonialism where the physiognomic categorisation of lower caste women or men by upper caste and elite men had a 'scientific' validation in the form of anthropometry.

Divya Rama Gopalakrishnan is a Lecturer in History at La Trobe University and she did her PhD in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. Her thesis examined the control of venereal disease and sexual surveillance in colonial South India. Divya is currently working on a project on the history of cancer and cancer therapies in India.

Choreographies of health and hygiene: Scientific approaches to dance and the body in modern Australia
Averyl Gaylor (University of Melbourne)

Scientific and medicalised discourses of the body informed dance practices in modern Australia. Across different dance methods and contexts, this paper traces the way such discourses were leveraged to legitimise dance as not only a codified and technical artistic practice, but also, a crucial practice of health that could discipline the body towards a more ideal form. This paper explores, in particular, the way theories of mechanisation and scientific management coalesced in dance producing ‘choreographies of health and hygiene’ that prescribed particular kinds of movement and corporeal forms, which functioned to render some bodies as moral and others as pathological and in need of intervention and reform. In doing so, this paper offers a new perspective on the pivotal role of dance in relation to histories of hygiene and health in modern Australia.

Averyl Gaylor graduated with a PhD in History from La Trobe University in December 2023. Her PhD project explored the medicalisation of dance and its influence on notions and aesthetics of the perfectible body in modern Australia. Currently, Averyl is working as a research centre administrator at Melbourne Law School while she continues to pursue interdisciplinary research projects in the medical humanities.