David Turnbull is a key figure in Australian Science and Technology Studies. Along with Max Charlesworth, David Wade Chambers, and Helen Verran, Turnbull is linked with the establishment of a Science and Technology Studies tradition at Deakin University, Australia, in the 1980s and 1990s.
This interview with David Turnbull was conducted by Emma Kowal (Deakin University) and Radhika Gorur (Deakin University) in 2018. It covers Turnbull's experience of Deakin University STS, STS in Australia and internationally, Indigenous kowledge traditions, and Turnbull's past -- and current -- research interests. The recording was transcribed, and is presented here unedited.
N.B.: There was an unintentional break in the recording early in the interview, which is noted in the transcript.
Radhika Gorur: It's so wonderful to have you with us here David and thank you so much for making time for this conversation, which Emma and I are really looking forward to. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into this STS business to start with? How did it all start, what was your early training in and how did you stumble upon STS?
David Turnbull: Well, I didn't, as it were, return to academia until I was 35. I was working on a yacht and sailing up the coast, presumably to go around the world, but I began to realize I wasn't going to make it, going around the world, and so I decided to go back to university.
I went to Melbourne HPS, sort of walked up with a rucksack and said, "Can I do an MA?" They said, "Maybe." I had a degree in Philosophy, so they let me do an MA Prelim, and I started tutoring at Melbourne University at the end of the first year of the Prelim and 18 years later, I wrote a PhD, and meanwhile went off and got a job at Deakin who had started Science and Society ... Social Studies of Science, it was called back then.
Technically, I was hired on as a Course Developer, which meant I had to do the photocopying and make the coffee, but they also turned out to need somebody to write some content. At the time I thought I was a Philosopher of Science or, an Historian of Science or maybe, I just began to hear about the Sociology of Science, since basically it didn't get much of a reference at Melbourne University.
What changed everything for me, was a visit to Deacon by Donald McKenzie from Edinburgh University and he was there for six months, and so he introduced me to SSK and so I think of myself as a member of the SSK tribe and so started going to the bath meetings with Harry Collins and so I went to Edinburgh and meet the whole group up there including Steve Shapin, David Bloor and all those kind of people. David Edge come to Australia roughly in that same period.
I was deeply influenced both by Donald McKenzie and by Shapin and Schaffer and at the same time the other major influence I think on what was going on, was that we were required to write courses at Deakin for Indigenous students. That was due to ... for Aboriginal students at Deakin I think and we wrote courses deliberately so that they would be available to them.
And David Wade Chambers made the decision that the best way to break with the dependence on literacy that goes with normal academic procedures, was to try and break from standard texts and present courses as sort of exhibitions, as galleries of ideas, which can be read as it were visually, as well as-
*Break in recording*
Radhika Gorur: You had a question about Maps are Territories?
Emma Kowal: Okay, so as you were in the middle of talking about the ... in order to cater to Indigenous students, you took a different approach in the-
David Turnbull: Yeah, basically that's what framed the way in which, for example Maps are Territories is written, it's written both as text of course but, it's heavily illustrated, deliberately as an exhibition of images — breaking, thereby, I think this sort of, the excessive emphasis on literacy. I also think it changes everything cognitively too.
It's certainly changed the way I think and work. I think and work in ... often when I'm trying to write a paper, I try and assemble images that are going to tell a story and then when you start to look at the images, and say, "Well, what actually is in this image?" What you were going to say changes because the image actually, it tells you something much more profound, much more interesting.
The dynamic of the interaction between the images and the words become very important and I think Wade has gone on for example in there too, to be using this kind of thing with indigenous students in America. I've written quite a few courses for them over there and it works much better for them, obviously in Australia it's not quite the same. But in America, his students are allowed to answer the so-called essay questions in any modality that they choose. And that can be photographic or it can be singing dancing, or any form of presentation, that explains or speaks to their understanding of their own relationship to the land for example, or their families, or whatever. Breaking that mold, I think saved me from what I think was death by anality that goes with Philosophy of Science.
I used to write lots of Philosophy of Science papers, which all ended up more or less the same, i.e. demonstrating that the logic of my analysis was so persuasive that you couldn't avoid agreeing with me, and that the 11th thesis on Feuerbach was the only way to go. That got tedious and boring as well as anal and being able to break away from that and become what I think I am, which is a story teller.
Emma Kowal: Okay, so let's go back to Melbourne Uni, so what year was at when you were there and doing your MA and who was around there that influenced you either by, in a positive way or by showing you what you didn't want to do.
David Turnbull: Okay, I had a supervisor, Henry Krips and he was a philosopher, he was actually a quantum physicist turned philosopher and so I was a student of his in the important being, in the sense that, this is where I discovered that philosophy and history weren't really going to cut it for me because I thought I was right in my thesis on the demarcation dispute, science versus non-science illustrated by, its incapacity to deal with astrology. The more I looked into astrology and why it failed as it were historically, it became a sociological question, not a philosophical question about whether or not it was science or non-science.
At the same time, I was actually teaching in every course that was available at Melbourne, so I taught the History of Astronomy, History of Chemistry, this sort of thing and became again convinced that the way all these things were taught in terms of, you know, Lavoisier was born in 1842, boring, boring, boring, it had to be sociological. But I wasn't quite clear in my head how you do that exactly because nobody was doing Sociology of Science at Melbourne, you're either a historian or a philosopher.
If you are a philosopher, I can quote one of them, “I have no concern with what scientists actually do, I'm only interested in what they ought to do,” and that's sort of paralyzingly awful. Historians really are only interested ultimately at Melbourne in who did what, where, when — again, sterile. Getting to Deakin and realizing that my task and amongst other things was to write courses about Pacific Navigation for example, liberated me entirely from those kinds of constraints, but it was recognizing as a theoretical framework, which can really address this issues in the form of SSK that, as it will set me free.
Emma Kowal: Was there, apart from Deakin was there anywhere else in Australia that was doing that Sociology of science at that time that you knew about?
David Turnbull: Well, there were various people but we weren't really all that coherent as a community, because Wollongong for example, they are the people I knew best. Then there was Jim Faulk ... sorry I'm just having a senior moment ... what's the name of the woman who was there? She will come back to me. She was writing about the sort of sociology of medicine, she was very good, and David Mercer and can't remember the other one.
Anyway, all of this was slightly, it felt to me like the only coherence in terms of having a sense that there is a discipline here, was overseas. As I say Edinburgh was very clearly, entirely, yeah they'd got the basics sorted and of course Bruno. In the early days I met John Law, Bruno and I think I spent half my life trying to pretend not to be Bruno Latour at all but fortunately for me, he's drifted off in various directions that I don't have to worry about and besides who can ... I can't read as fast as he writes so, I can't keep up.
Back in the early days, he was extremely influential and Geoff Bowker was at HPS, as a student, went off and joined Bruno and Jeff and I've been in sort of mild cahoots in a sense. I would say he's one of the leading Australian STS scholars, if not the leading one.
Radhika Gorur: Bowker is Australian?
David Turnbull: Yeah.
Radhika Gorur: Wow! I didn't know that.
David Turnbull: Well, there you go, it needs to be pointed out, so by the way is Simon Schaffer.
Radhika Gorur: Really? Wow!
Emma Kowal: Really?
David Turnbull: Yep, born in Brisbane.
Radhika Gorur: I have to go and confront them with this because, yeah they've been overseas for so long. Now, in 1994, I was reading about this workshop that you held calling, Working Disparate Knowledge Systems Together. It seems at the time when you wrote something I think prior to the workshop or about the workshop, you talked about reaching out to the ethics department, working at Deakin and you talked about linking the networks in New England and ANU, James Cook. I get a sense that, that kind of follows from what you were saying in terms of, a sense of trying to search for a cohesiveness or assembling some kind of a discipline, can you tell us a little bit about those ethics and what kind of response you got or ...?
David Turnbull: Yeah, well I'll tell you the first story first.
It was Helen Verran and me, right, Helen was very much part of it and so we tried to get these people together, but we were having basic trouble back home i.e with the local Aborigines. IKE [Institute of Koorie Education] then, was run by Wendy Brabman and we had our problems, really serious problems with Wendy Brabman that wrote all this material for Aboriginal students, we were never allowed to teach it, nor were we ever allowed to assess it. It would disappear into IKE and that would be the end of it. IKE is the Institute of Koorie Education.
Of course, we invited anybody and everybody from IKE to come to this conference, this symposium, whatever you want to call it and we invited some Maoris, three Maori women came along with various other people. The Maori women are the point, they arrived and they said, "We are going to take over this afternoon session," right, staring me in the face, ya know. I said, "Oh! Okay, well go for it," so what they did, one of them spoke for 20 minutes in Maori, then the next one translated and so on. That was a good hour.
Well, there was only one person in the whole audience who could speak Maori or understand what they said, but anyway, then they said, "Look, what we've done, is tell you mountain and our river and our canoe, and that is how we identify ourselves. Well, now we want each of you to explain your selves in terms of your mountain, your river and your canoe." The Aborigines had at this point heard that the Maoris had taken over the afternoon and stuck it to the white man so they decided to turn up, complete with their elder, a woman called Dawn Wolf.
Dawn was in tears at this point because she has not got any of her own language and could not address this issue at all in her own terms and this really riled up all her… she had an entourage of the other Aborigines who were on her behalf annoyed with the Maoris for being so incredibly in-diplomatic, so the whole thing broke up into chaos. Of course the white people in the audience reacted variously to this demand ... complete sort of threatening demand by the Maoris.
One woman, called Lewa Braus, spoke in German and refused to translate it and everybody had to make up their own story.
Emma Kowal: So it was babel.
David Turnbull: A bit chaotic and I spent the evening talking to some Aboriginal people about all this and they were kind of sympathetic with our endeavor, but we were worried that it could have gone a whole lot better. In some ways, you could say that was a great success because it broke many of the molds that go with most of this sort of thing.
But basically, in the end, I think the whole attempt fell on deaf ears really, largely because the Establishment community of HPS, STS whatever you want to call it in Australia, doesn't really want to know about multiple ontologies and the difficulties of not trying to assimilate them and just letting them speak to themselves. They don't want to…they still don’t want to know as far as I can tell.
Emma Kowal: Did you-
David Turnbull: You’re obviously in the business on being an exception to this, but back then-
Emma Kowal: and did you ever try anything like that again, or did that ...?
David Turnbull: No, that more or less was coincident with, Helen then moved to Melbourne HPS and to give you an example of what happened after that, she goes to Melbourne and I just felt as far as I’m concerned it’s a great success. Melbourne advertises some position in technology and society, I can't remember the exact title anyway, I applied for it and when it become apparent that I might be at the top of the shortlist, they changed the terms and conditions of the add, which is actually illegal. According to my spies on the inside, the reason, quote-on-quote was, "We don't want another one like Helen."
Anyway, I'm glad I didn't get the job because Melbourne HPS then fell apart, got relegated to being a program and not a department and some other lot, whole long sad drama. In effect, it was happening to everybody, happened to us at Deakin, i.e. they shut down Social Studies of Science. It happened to, basically or something like eight departments across Australia that had various forms of STS.
Radhika Gorur: Going back a little bit about the early times and you met a number of really key people at Edinburgh and so on, what was actually happening globally at that time in the STS community? Sounds like a very exciting time where, the kind of schools or kind of strands of STS forming and contracting each other and so on.
David Turnbull: Yeah, basically it was a question of, did you go along with the Edinburgh School or not, were you going to team up with Bruno? They were the big players but at the same time various other areas where sort of, just doing it their own way. Like many of the people in America weren't influenced by either of that, either of those things, but they got bogged down quite quickly in the culture wars, which didn't do them any good. They had to sort of fight to keep alive, but I think most of that sort of thing has faded away. I mean the culture wars died, and most of the worries about reflexivity, symmetry, all those sorts of things that people were terribly, profoundly concerned about back then, and throwing the chicken out with ... the baby out with the bath water all that-
Radhika Gorur: Bath water, okay, yeah, the epistemological chicken.
David Turnbull: I should have mentioned Steve Woolgar as well, I was very influenced by Steve and Malcolm Ashmore. Malcolm, as I'm sure you know is in South America, Colombia. He's in Bogota running a very good program there with his partner Olga.
So the action, I think started to spread out in different kinds of ways. So you got a school around Bruno but then there's what was going on in Holland .I was very impressed, because unlike nearly everywhere else, in Holland STS and government policy, took each other seriously. You could go out of a degree in STS and get a job with the government changing the world. They wanted to change the world, they wanted to make Holland float — literally — and they wanted some advice about this. It changes the way people do STS, if you're taken seriously.
In Australia, nobody gives a rat’s ass about STS in terms of the government or policy or whatever, and you'd never get a job under the banner of STS. In America it's slightly different because most of the ways it was conformed back then, was as a cooperation between different faculties, Science and Art faculties for example, it would be across faculty thing. It would depend almost entirely on the politics of that arrangement which was always sort of breaking and coalescing because it's always awkward getting people to cooperate across those kinds of boundaries and STS always fell in the middle.
In some places, it got really very well established, others, it didn’t really appear as STS, like at Santa Cruz it's not really there. It's there in different manifestations, I'm not quite sure what the formation is at the moment. When I was there, I was actually in something called communications or something like that but I was working really in, whatever Cultural Studies was called at the time. Again, it didn't actually exist as a recognized entity but it manifested itself in the ways that all these people were thinking and writing.
Emma Kowal: So as STS tended to be something that so many people do but the institutions tend to be fairly fleeting.
David Turnbull: Yeah, because there's something about STS that's sort of evanescent, because it grows and changes all the time and hasn't got the kind of clear foundation on necessity that, let's say, philosophy has. You know, where is Aristotle for STS and that why when there's a war, as in that's exactly what happens at Deakin, where then was a cut, a massive funding cut, the so called foundation disciplines drew their wagons into a circle but anything that was interdisciplinary or trans or across disciplinary, whatever you want to call it, fell between the cracks and got tossed out, because it was hard to say, "We are an essential way of understanding the world, we can show we got this firm foundation." We couldn't do that.
We all saw trouble because as soon as the wars started, we started to lose students and the others were stealing them and that sort of thing and we were done in by people who changed their mind. We had massive numbers of students at one point, really large numbers because we taught police students, we taught nurse students, all these people. Suddenly then withdrew their students and so we were left ... we sort of, were looking like we weren’t getting bums on seats and we felt we've been betrayed because we'd worked hard for all these people.
I taught nurses for years and they ought have been grateful, so I ...
Radhika Gorur: I was trying to like get a sense of the issues that, in that most concerned you and that which you were engaged in your own scholarship and it seems as though there's on the one hand a whole cartography and maps and that side of things, also the whole, post-coloniality both as a project and as a method probably. This might not even be a fair way to describe your work at all, so can you tell us a little bit about the pre-occupations and the issues that have mattered to you?
David Turnbull: I think what fundamentally I'm interested in is the interaction between knowledge and space. How knowledge is moved and assembled and what the differences or, what difference it makes in the socio-technical practices that go on with that. I think all knowledge is produced in particular places.
So Indigenous knowledge and science, do not differ, they're both profoundly local. The difference lies in how you move that and assemble it and that varies a lot in historical terms and in social terms and technical terms. Movement is really what I'm focused on and how things become assembled and most of it depends ... or while a lot of it depends on the notion that, things don't have to be dictated by a plan or an elite so that for example, a long time ago I wrote an article about Gothic Cathedrals and how they got built. I wrote that because I went to a lecture in architecture on how Chartres was built and the guy who gave that talk said, it was the hard work of many men, there were no plans. What happened was that a group of guys had turn up and they worked until the money ran out and they'd be dismissed.
Then there would be some timing, some more money would be accumulated and a completely different bunch of guys would turn up, completely different set of measures, completely different set of understandings of how a stone should be cut et cetera, and they just added to what had previously been already built. It was ad hoc and messy and there were no plans, there was no master architect and nonetheless you end up with a gloriously complex structure, out of these people just working together in an ad hoc kind of way, which is, that I thought I'd just write this up as sort of a paragraph, illustrating, this is how science actually works.
If you look at what scientists do, that's what's going on and it turned into an article and then I thought, well maybe there is something much more profound about all this, so it speaks very much to the sort of thing that Geoff and Lee were writing about for example, boundary objects and all the rest of it.
That is really where it ... for me, it's all about, in the end, how things move and how they get connected and how that creates a kind of a knowledge space and how that is actually, both a cultural, a social and a technical kind of thing. It's in those spaces that knowledge gets performed, so I became very deeply affected by the whole performative approach to all this sort of thing as an add on to SSK. SSK wasn't all that performative in the early days.
Now, I'd say that's the thing, you’ve got to understand everything performatively. You actually bring the world into being, so in that sense I'm deeply influenced by Tim Ingold, for example.
Radhika Gorur: Tell us a little bit about some of your key publications?
David Turnbull: Well, one of them I suppose that made a big splash was Maps are Territories because I wrote that for Deakin and in the process of writing it, I went to visit a guy called David Woodward who is the ... was the editor for the Giant History of Maps project, which came out in four volumes and had a whole volume devoted to indigenous mapping.
Unfortunately I didn't get there in time to talk to his partner in this enterprise, he died before I got there but nonetheless, I talked to various players but especially David and so when Maps are Territories actually came out, he took it to the University of Chicago press and they looked at it and said, "Yeah, great, wonderful, lets ..." so the sort of, out of nowhere, suddenly I had an international publication and Maps are Territories, got circulated around the world. That I think, is as much to do with the way it's presented, the quality of the imagery, the color and all that sort of thing. That's where Deakin was at its finest moment, when we were allowed to do that.
You're not allowed to do that now, as you well know. The materials are as boring as bat shit because they're all done to a template. You’ve got to fit it in this template. Back then we were taught, go for your life and do what you think you have to do, and we were supported in that. And imagine turning up to University of Chicago Press with a modern Deakin text, Oh! No, so that was great, I think that helped me as it were a lot.
I think the other one that sort of had an impact was the Gothic Cathedral's article and then there was the book, Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers That had a very peculiar history because it was published by a group Harwood, I think. Anyway, Harwood got lost as it were on the path to glory. They were a bunch of fumblewits — really, really bad.
Anyway, they didn't do any of the things that they promised to do, like launch the book or anything like that, or find anyway to get it reviewed sensibly, I had to do all that myself and I had to pay for all the images and yeah ... and permissions, I had to do all that myself. I had to do the index, I had to do everything, so any flaws I it are entirely mine, but then ... what ... Oh! Yes, Routledge bought Harwood and Routledge wrote to me and said, "Look, we've got a bit of a problem, we can't find any of the sales details of your book. We can't find where the books are." Harwood was so fucked up that, nobody knew anything about anything, like where are the actual books, where is the warehouse? How many of them have you sold?
Radhika Gorur: Wow!
David Turnbull: So Routledge has got this problem and I didn't realize they had a kind of a problem, that they were going to sort out in the way they did and till too late. I was at some ... forget, it doesn't matter anyway, a meeting with a colleague and he says, "Oh! Congratulations, second edition Routledge”, I'm like, "What, nobody's told me."
So Routledge decided the only honest way that they could all this was to republish it. Well, they never asked me and they never told me, so it's not been my favorite child since. Anyway, that's by the by, but since all that, I've been out of Deakin for 14 years, but I rely on being invited overseas roughly twice a year by people who want me to do various things, and that works most of the time.
It didn't work in 2009, all the invites suddenly got canceled because of the GFC and I think things are slowly, starting to fade out, partly. I think it's a generational thing, so the last ... I was invited to South America, that's true, yeah, “Oh! Sorry, okay maybe there's not going to be any next year,” I always think this about this time of year.
I was invited twice this year, it's strange. I did a thing in Leeuwarden. On the background to Leeuwarden is the area of Holland, which is under water or below sea-level and they're going they are going to be the cultural capital of Europe in 2018 and the center that I work for VAAL is part of the project of offering them various green designs to present in this exhibition they are having next year. My background paper, which is what I do for VAAL all the time, is write how to understand the landscape historically in terms of what Leeuwarden is focused on, which is terps — terps are mounds. Mounds that you build at the water of the North Sea is rising and these mounds then get joined together and there's a community, gets formed, a kind of polity gets formed around it called “mienskip”.
The paper is about understanding that and then you can start thinking about how Leeuwarden should reimagine itself in the future but I was also invited to the South American thing. But I suspect, all this will run out.
Radhika Gorur: Nevertheless, I was going to ask you something about your current preoccupations and earlier when we were talking you mentioned Rock Art, and I wanted to know what is exciting these days in terms of research or in terms of learning?
David Turnbull: Well, to take the kind of approach that I do, there's a bigger plot, it's not just rock art, I think I've now been to all the major Rock Art sites in the world, though obviously there're millions that I'll never going to get to, that are less important. There is one major one that I still want to go to, but it's quite small.
What I'm really working on is Narratives of Prehistory and amongst the narratives that I think extremely interesting is the claim that the rock art in Europe is the oldest in the world and it spread out from there and now we know just like, say with agriculture, agriculture was invented in at least six places, more or less at the same time without having any communication with the other places.
Same with rock art. Rock art was being done by the Indig, in at least six different places more or less at the same time and Europe doesn't really have a strangle hold on being the oldest or the most important, but that's all part of the rewriting of the, Out of Africa story as for example you were saying earlier that we got a very different picture now. It flows into and out of them, between and all the rest of it and so the whole narrative of prehistory needs rewriting. That's part of my project, about ... if you're going to understand that the knowledge-base dynamic, you've got to understand movement.
How you explain how people actually moved and handled being in a completely strange and new and problematic environment, about which they knew nothing, how did they actually do that? One of the ways that I think needs to be re-explored as I mentioned in passing, is that homo erectus was actually a seafarer. If you're going to be serious about seafering you're taking a huge risk, right because it isn't just you and your mates, it's you and you're family and your children and your animals and you've got to he worked out away of doing seafaring which is going to get you there, so you've got a group that can reproduce.
You need the key thing that's dying from explanation, how do you get that kind of collaboration going that early, when you're probably pre-linguistic? That's where you got to start, if you want to explain this today, you have to look back to, how did we actually do this collaborating bid before we could even speak to each other? If homo erectus could be included as us, I think they can be, so that's where you begin from ... well, that's where I begin anyway.
Emma Kowal: Just on that, so from the little that I understand of this, the idea of the use of fire is vastly predating this and so, sociality predates language, so does that undermine the importance of language?
David Turnbull: I think so, yes, I think all kinds of things happen with fire. I'll just save that for a moment, I think where you got look to, is synchronization because what you've got to do is synchronize actual embodied movement. You don't actually have to be able to say it, but you do have to be able to do it in synchrony with somebody else, and so amongst the things that are evident as sort of good things to think about, is our music and dance.
Music and dance are fundamentally about being in synchrony and the joy and the pleasure that comes from being synchronized. I think most of the explanations about collaborative work, like building Göbekli Tepe for example, is not, "Ah! It's all about ritual and they had to be in lead and dictated.” People do this things for the joy of it. So much of rock art is, I think a performance of that communal pleasure. Again, of course you've got to draw back a bit because the evidence is not there.
Emma Kowal: Yeah, it's pre-linguistic rock art, yeah.
David Turnbull: That's right, so but nonetheless we, do know that homo erectus did sail, he did go to sea, so somehow they managed that and if one can get that sorted out and worked out in a much more elaborate a nuanced story of prehistory about how we managed to leave Africa. I'm not at all sure that we did, actually. In my wilder dreams, I don't think everything began in Africa at all. I’m much more in favor of there being a dynamic interaction across the Asian continent.
Homo erectus arrives in China, moves to Africa. Humans move out of Africa but everybody is in interaction with everybody, there's a dynamic flow and it isn't ... archaeology is easy in Africa and difficult in China. Most of the remains are buried quite deep, and in Africa they’re near surface, it's easier to follow them.
The whole thing is taphonomically distorted, nonetheless, the story has got to be how knowledge and space co-produce each other, by virtue of our moving through the landscape and that's where you start.
Emma Kowal: Does multi-regionalism capture your view?
David Turnbull: Yes, it does a lot, I'm very ... I was a friend of Alan Ford and I was very taken with the whole multi-regional approach and I think basically Chris Stringer and the lads are now swinging unhappily towards multi-regionalism.
Emma Kowal: You think it's ... your STS-informed view would favor multi-regionalism?
David Turnbull: Well, indeed of course it would, it fits very well with whole idea about networks and rhizomatic connections so we’ve got to acknowledge an influence from Deleuze and Guattari and all the rest of it, but I'm happy with that, I’m very rhizomatic in that sense.
I think it is in fact a Deleuzian kind of a process going on. All this knowledge and space stuff can be re-theorized, if you like, in terms of territorialization, de-territorialization, re-territorialization, so quite a bit of what I write about, is about that. For example, I've just written a thing for Arena on the spatiality of genomics. That will be out early in 201. But I think so that means, things like identity now have to be read in terms of a whole process of recognizing that we're multiplicitous at every level and this means that a different form of spatiality has to be acknowledged in genomics itself. That everything that is being read as a text, is being misrepresented. It's not about information, it's about timing and spacing.
Once you get to timing and spacing, you’re back to Bruno, but again, that changes what territory is. Territory is no longer something that's sort of fixed, determinant, and Cartesianally bounded, it is a dynamic process itself because of the way you are in it, is what makes it to be a territory. It is all very STS — STS has had, I think within it nascent possibilities that have yet to be brought to bear on everything but if you have the big picture story of this architectonic knowledge and space in continuous co-production from the beginning and going on now, very dynamically right now, all the time.
Emma Kowal: You’re talking there about post-genomics and epigenetics?
David Turnbull: Yeah.
Emma Kowal: Yeah, excellent.
David Turnbull: That's the art for me, while I'm writing about Out of Africa, I'm also writing about, here and now.
Radhika Gorur: John Law has talked about the diaspora, the STS diaspora and of people going off into feminist STS, and post colonialist STS et cetera, I wanted to get your sense, some of the connections that have been made, some of the ways people have branched off into different things and some connections that have been missed. You mentioned a minute ago the possibilities of a STS that are still to unfold as it were.
David Turnbull: Yeah, I think that's true, I think by and large, STS has been far too focused on ... predominantly focused on the contemporary, the here and now. I think the here and now has obviously got to be investigated — no problem — but the deeper, more nuanced understanding of it has got to come from a deeply historical understanding of how humans came to be, the way they are.
That is itself a dynamic process and you’ve got to start at the beginning or as far back as one can go but I think it's a welcome process for it to be diasporic. That was, I think always the problem for me when I was more of an STS practitioner than I am now. I don't see myself as in STS anymore, I think of myself as completely liberated from the constraints of STS. Like I said, I'm a storyteller. I'm deeply influenced by it, but I no longer sort of feel constraint.
The reason I feel better, as it were is, when I was fully committed professional STSer, writing course and all those sort of thing, was how do you deal with the reality that everything is relevant, absolutely everything. I pick up the newspaper in the morning and I can't that there's anything that's irrelevant, it's all ... so of course there's going to be a diaspora. You cannot deal with everything all at once, somebody's got to say, "Well, okay I'm going to do STS and sport," or whatever, some subgenre you want to get into and people are going to start splitting and fissioning, and disagreeing and saying, "What you’ve got is just ... you’re all guys let us women do our thing, right, good excellent, do it." It will cohere temporarily again in the future or not and that's the way that ... I think it's all ... I'm in favor of it.
What I also would like to be in favor of is, the thing that I think has always been part of our concern with Deakin but has had a slow, less than glorious life I guess is the whole Indigenous thing. The whole question of Indigenous knowledge comes in and out of focus all the time. It gets celebrated as you all know in various places like South Africa where it's in the remit of the government, you got to have Indigenous knowledge but they don't really think that.
They think there's an ideology to it and they think there's some money in it, but they're not really, actually that focused on indigenous knowledge. Getting people to take Indigenous knowledge seriously and the challenge of understanding it and getting Indigenous people into STS, in the end is got to be them, it can't be me or you, I mean we're white guys. We might have some intelligent things to say, but we cannot speak from their position they have got to be able to articulate their own understanding and that's the problem with rock art.
Rock art — constantly, people say we have no idea what it means, the people who drew it are not here to ask. But they don't actually have any Indigenous informants, or hardly any, about for example Australian art. Nearly all of the practitioners, all the voices are in fact white, that's exactly what happened in at a Rock Art Conference I went to, where we were supposed to be celebrating the Indigenous voice, but the biggest presence was Australian but they were all white and they were all old guys, all with grey hair. Oh! There was a woman, there was one woman, sorry but she was as old as me.
Radhika Gorur: Could I shift kind of the questions a little bit, for us it's very exciting to have 4S coming to Sydney, first time coming to Australia for the first time as it were, and when they announced that it was coming to Sydney, somebody tweeted, 'a year left for somebody to explain to me why 4S is taking place in Sydney, a continent far away with practically no STS.' Then I saw that seem rather ironic that one of the key contributions of STS, scholars of Australia, was about the situated nature of knowledges, and to think that there is no STS that seems to be associated with Australia. For so many Australian scholars to have simply disappeared for this person, seemed like really strange and interesting.
There lots of good responses, in response to that tweet, why should we have STS in Australia and one of them was, to do with airfares for people in Asia and in the Asia pacific and one of them was to do with, you can taste Tim Tams. There was also some more serious ones, which talked about ... which pointed out that they were indeed many STS scholars who have made brilliant contributions to STS and so it's not right to say that there's no STS in Australia. Which might not be the same thing actually, having Australian scholars contributing to STS might not be the same thing as having an Australian STS, so yeah ...
David Turnbull: Well, it's obviously true that there is much less institutional STS than there was at one point, back in the 90's let's say, when it was probably at a peak. There was a demolition of all kinds of departments, I'm not quite sure how you would count them now, but let's say it's somewhere between one and a half and two, as opposed to eight back then, but also I think, this is a generational thing, yeah.
There's a younger generation rising up and they don't know anything about what the old farts wrote back then, why would they?
Radhika Gorur: Or may not have known as them as Australian as it was in my case, I didn't know for example that Bowker, Schaffer was Australian so yeah.
David Turnbull: In one sense, of course it doesn't matter they're Australian, they hadn’t practiced in Australia, so that they're Australian, so what? But Geoff did do his PhD in Australia. Geoff was a student of mine briefly and yeah, so was Richard Gillespie.
Back then people went off and did stuff, and so they’re Australian? So what? It doesn't make for an Australian STS. There's no sense in which Simon for example can be picked as in anyway Australian, in terms of what he does and what he thinks and how he writes, why would he? Yeah-
Radhika Gorur: There was deeply-
David Turnbull: ... but his wife by the way, she's in charge of the Haddon collection and its repatriation and that sort of thing. They have a strong background connection to Australia, and they come back here and do stuff but it's very hard to say who’s on the horizon in STS apart from you lot. Where else is it happening much? Sydney a bit, Wollongong a little bit, the glory days are over.
Emma Kowal: What were these eight departments before, so I mean, Deakin, Wollongong?
David Turnbull: I'd say there was Richard Yeo for example, interesting guy, important guy I think. He was at Griffith with a guy called, he was editor of Meta-Science for a while. I'm just blanking on his name, something like Ford perhaps, anyway, Richard Yeo is technically a historian of science but he and, well I can look it up ... anyway, they edited the collection called, Rhetoric and Scientific Method or words to that effect, that was I think, a very important work.
One of the first sort of really serious critiques of the the scientific method and its variations. He doesn't get featured much, I think he should be. There was a fully-fledged department at Wollongong under Ron Johnson. Ron was of the same generation as Fred Jevons. Fred Jevons was the foundational Vice Chancellor of Deakin.
They're both English and they're both coming out of Australia, very different kinds of ways of approaching but both of them, in effect were ... they wouldn't have said we're in STS but they were effectively, precursors of STS, so that as it were departments that correspond to this. Then there were people around who were teaching STS-type or running STS-type courses like Chris Ryan at RMIT. Where else was it sort of happening? I’m having trouble thinking…
Emma Kowal: It's okay.
David Turnbull: All this is ancient history.
Emma Kowal: We can ... I also had a couple of other like follow-up ... just with the program at Deakin, what kind of legacy do you think it's had? We have talked about the textbooks obviously, and the people who went through. I know that Richard Gillespie was involved in some of the curriculum development, probably some other people as well. And I suppose, yeah, just a more of a sense of what legacy it's had in Australia or internationally and also I don't really know if they're any post-grad students that went-I mean you got the online masters that you had, do you have a sense of a cohort of ...?
David Turnbull: No, because it was so brief, I think the only one who went to the MA program and has now, as it were any kind of presence is Joe Gelonesi. He's on the ABC, he runs the philosophy program, I don't know what that's called, I’ve forgotten.
I don’t think we had any really major impact at all. I think we vanished without a trace, basically. And yeah, there're a few lingering things, I mean the publications perhaps, some of them, sort of, are still referenced. Maps are Territories, still are though it's a long time ago, it's, I don't know, 93' or something. It was a very long tome ago.
Emma Kowal: Then, just you've mentioned VAAL so I suppose just, can you say a bit more about how you find a spot there and what, how that's influenced what you do?
David Turnbull: Well, there was a center attached to HPS when HPS still had a department and that as called Access something ... Australian Science Technology and Innovation, some such, yeah. It tried to cover all the basics of STS and that was jointly run by Chris Ryan and Jim Faulk.
Jim Faulk had moved from-
Emma Kowal: Wollongong?
David Turnbull: I think ... I can't remember whether it was actually a ... what's that university in the norther suburbs called?
Emma Kowal: Macquarie.
David Turnbull: No, no, La Trobe suburbs?
Emma Kowal: VU?
Radhika Gorur: Victoria University.
David Turnbull: Victoria University, thank you. Yeah He went off to be a Vice Chancellor of that but at the same time, he and Chris were running this center, out of it. I wasn't actually in that center, but that center whatever it was called, but let’s say it was called Australian Science Technology and Society split into two.
Jim was going to run the bid, that he take ... go away with the bid that he actually ran, which was really about energy nuclear power, that sort of thing. That was his major interest. Chris was doing sort of Green-Urban design, so when the HPS department collapsed, Chris took his Green-Urban design part called it VAAL and got accommodated in architecture. I went along with that, so technically, at the minute — and if you're still watching the clock it may not be true by 12:00 — I'm in architecture.
Architecture is about to be demolished, so we think. It's not at all clear but it looks like that but Chris is retiring this year and one sense, the era is over, that it's very messy and hard to say exactly what’s going on but, Chris is the guy who does the magic. He has imported an 11 million dollars worth of funding into VAAL and it's because he is a dream weaver. He's magical, the way he produces all this money, however when he retires there won't be anybody who has his kind of charisma.
That may not help, but I think in fact the faculty is indifferent to the question of the funding, I think they're determined to knock it off, so that's how I got to be there and so what I do for them, over the years is write for example papers about Venice, Singapore, Florence, Sigri and Leeuwarden I've been covering. They're all about how these sorts of places are coming into being through the trade and interaction, through movement, through people’s moments.
Radhika Gorur: Do you have any further questions Emma?
I was going to ask you some kind of summary kind of question now, or peeking at the crystal ball, what prospects for the future both in Australia and globally, where do you see STS heading?
David Turnbull: Well, I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer that question. Because like I say, I kind of detached myself. And if you're a sort of free willing story teller and I deliberately don't go to STS conferences anymore because it's too big a bumfight. Again, as I've already said, there're so many things to be focused on or to be interested in, yeah. There's no better time in one way to be in STS, I mean, how many problems out there demand an STS type solution? Well, virtually all of them.
Whether STS is actually coming insufficiently into focus and strength, to deal with them, like I really can't answer. I have very really little sense of what is happening in STS with for example let's say cyber warfare, I don't know, I have no idea, absolutely none. Somebody, I would hope-
Emma Kowal: Drones are very hot right now.
David Turnbull: ... is doing something or other because, they got to and yeah, everywhere you look, they couldn't… I mean it’s in the nature of the bee sting. Absolutely everything we're looking at, the place we're in, the health condition, everything is subject to STS. Now as I say, is STS handling the task? I'm not sure they are but, then I am not actually, I am deliberately turning away to focus on, almost, questions that STS normally doesn't do at all. The Out of Africa bit for example. It's not really an STS area, I just think it should be. Or I don't care if it isn't, that's what I'm doing.
Emma Kowal: Well, yeah evolutionary biology is ripe for STS analysis.
David Turnbull: Yeah, I think so, so I should have a mentioned another influence, Jan Sapp. You don't know Jan Sapp? You all do because he's a historian of biology and he was at Melbourne, not in the period that I was ... he wasn't there in the early days.
He's a very interesting Historian of Epigenetics and that sort of thing, he's at York.
Emma Kowal: Sapp?
David Turnbull: Sapp. And he's written half a dozen books on history of biology. And I owe a lot to conversations with him. He and I used to shout at each other in the pub on Friday nights for years.
Emma Kowal: About what?
David Turnbull: Well, about what counts as a biological explanation and things like that. Similarly, with Malcolm Simons, I used to talk to a lot. Of course, Malcolm was the guy who said, “junk DNA is not junk”, so those are a couple of influences. But Jan Sapp, I think was the kind of person that HPS Melbourne ought to be enabled to contain but they just couldn't handle him. He's too big for them in the sense of ... yeah, I think many of his understandings ... no, I think I have become, sorry this is the wrong way to put it.
I think I spend most of my professional life, trying to critique biology as a bad influence on the social understandings. I now think I'm much more persuaded by thinking biologically in a useful and constructive kind of way than I was when I was critiquing it. I think following let’s say Maturana and Varela that everything is in one sense fundamentally biological, I think the life itself is about connecting and if there's something that's really going on, it's all about how does connecting work by the both at the cellular level so to speak and at the social level.
If you think about it, in terms of complex adaptive systems which is another whole area that I've written about, I think that's something that STS ought to be getting into big time.
Emma Kowal: You kind of realized that it wasn't that biology was a bad analogy, but that we had bad analogies for biology?
David Turnbull: That's right, yeah. So I was sort of switched around, I found it quite embarrassing at the beginning because-
Radhika Gorur: The switching?
David Turnbull: Yeah, I just like, switching 180 degrees, you can't be that wrong, can you? Oh! Yes you can.
Emma Kowal: Well, you ain't alone.
Radhika Gorur: On that note, thank you very much, what a fascinating conversation.
David Turnbull: You're welcome.
