David Turnbull - 'Finding My Way Through Messy Contingencies: autoethnographic reflections on working in Social Studies of Science at Deakin University'

David Turnbull

I arrived in Australia when I was thirty after driving overland on the ‘hippy trail’ without any sense of direction or purpose except the feeling that in Australia anything was possible. Having escaped the restrictions of the English class system I could do whatever I wanted- just one problem, what did I want, how to find my way without a plan or an end in view? Two years later after stints as geological assistant, industrial radiographer, and iron ore truck driver, I volunteered as a deckhand on a voyage round the world. The boat was a replica of the oyster sloop Spray which in 1895 Joshua Slocum made first solo circumnavigation of the world. A way finding feat he achieved without an accurate chronometer, though he did have a one-handed tin clock that he occasionally got going by boiling it. Nor did he have a chart for the last stage of his three-year voyage– his goat ate it.

I brought my own voyage to an end when we were running up the Whitsunday Passage with all 14 sails set. As I stood on the bowsprit watching the dolphins cavorting beside me I realised it could not get any better than this, and I had to get engaged with something more intellectually satisfying.

I hitched down to Melbourne and enrolled as an MA prelim in HPS. I rattled through the undergrad courses in philosophy of science, Darwinism, history of astronomy, chemistry and geology and the Newtonian revolution and quickly became a tutor; academic life was a whole lot easier back then. Two years in I applied for a job at Deakin as a course developer for the Social Studies of Science course team and went for an interview with Wade Chambers, Lyndsay Farrell and Max Charlesworth on the panel. I got the job, I believe, because on the day of the interview, a letter I had written was published in the Age. The letter took Philip Adams to task for his naïve acceptance of Popper’s demarcation criteria in his dismissal of astrology. (My PhD thesis topic at that point was on the inadequacy of demarcations between science and non-science.) It happened that Max had read the letter so I got the job.

Strictly speaking in David Graeber’s terms it was a ‘bullshit job’.[2] Course development was taken to be a serious management discipline that would guide the ways in which ‘distance education’ materials would be best structured; ways held to be completely independent of the course content as I was informed in my introduction to the course development by the department head. In reality, without any help from course development, Social Studies of Science was well into producing the first year course Knowledge and Power and needed more hands writing materials to complete the three year undergrad degree.

Naturally I was delighted to get the chance to get stuck into it. But what was it? HPS Melbourne had not mentioned anything to do with sociology of science beyond Robert Merton, the only glimmerings I had encountered were in Bob Young’s works while I was tutoring Darwinism, and of course in my reading of Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend and Popper.[3]

As luck would have it Donald McKenzie came to Deakin for three months and introduced me to the strong program and the Edinburgh school and I found a theoretical direction in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK).[4]

There were of course other directional determinants, Deakin materials were initially produced for off-campus students whose only entry requirements were to have supported themselves for two years and be able to write a letter asking for admission. Students in other words who had fallen through the cracks and had not picked up formal academic qualifications. The other major determinant was the mandate to provide materials for aboriginal students in the Institute of Koori Education (IKE).

Basically we had to make it up as we went along without and any real disciplinary sense of direction, but we were allowed considerable liberty by Deakin University Press to produce materials in whatever way we liked. This I think set us free to tell stories breaking the normal disciplinary boundaries and academic modes of exegesis courtesy of Wade Chamber’s vision of breaking with the restrictions of text and presenting materials that are both visually and aesthetically effective.

But the point of my autoethnographic intro and the Slocum story is about way finding and how hard it is to talk about why you took the path you did without falling into trap of claiming to have known where you were going or having some special method.

This I think was really the point of SSK – the social history of science should not be written teleologically as if the actors know where they are going or that the explanation of what they did could be told retrospectively in terms of having found the truth. Critiques of what used to be called whiggish or internalist history science provided the grounding for the now well known symmetry principle of the Edinburgh School’s strong program– accounting for the acceptance of authoritative knowledge had to be in the same terms as that for knowledge claims that failed to become accepted. Another of their key principles was reflexivity, any sociological account of the way knowledge became accepted had to include itself. It seems to me that out of these anti-foundationalist stances of first-wave sociology of science grew the constructionist, situated practices, approach that characterised second-wave sociology of science that we became part of at Deakin, with the addition of an essential distinguishing orientation– the recognition of the multiplicity of knowledges and the attendant relativism. We found our way by walking.

I think this perspective on social studies of science as experimental practice shows its strength and its weakness. We did remarkable things for example Gavan Daws from ANU wrote Night of the Dolphins for us, a critical socio-political examination of animal rights and the question of animal cognition, James McCaughey head of drama at Deakin then created it as a theatrical performance that included the students. But radical innovations like this, or the beautiful course materials of Imaging Nature were only possible under a management regime that encouraged diversity and innovation allowing experimental practice in way finding as the context changes. It also encouraged the wider STS community locally and internationally to come and see what we were up to and to write units for us. By the 1990s Deakin had abandoned its off campus focus and had adopted a standardised template for all course materials, everything was on-line and homogeneous. At the same time Universities in Australia started to become businesses run as managerial compliance machines, a transformation reflected in the reality that when I started at Deakin academics outnumbered administrators 2:1, twenty-four years later when I left the ratio had reversed. The weakness of Social Studies of Science as experimental practice without a foundational discipline resulted in its closure in 2000 when the first round of funding cuts to the Arts Faculty led to a circling of the disciplinary wagons and the dismissal of interdisciplinary subject areas.

Now that fifteen years after my departure STS is undergoing a renaissance with a third wave generation of scholars I still think experiments in the interstices and across the boundaries are the path to follow. All summed up by the late great Leonard Cohen[5].

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.