Two of our Centre for Science in Society team were on podcasts recently.
Nayan Sheoran Appleton is featured on the Human Show. Rebecca Priestley on Radio New Zealand with Kim Hill interviewing Rebecca, Anne Noble, Huhana Smith, and Siouxsie Wiles.
Click here to listen to Nayan’s podcast. From the Human Show podcast:
“Nayantara engages us in a discussion about the technologies that effects the absolute majority of the entire population – pharmaceutical drugs, and more concretely – hormonal contraception. Having done extensive research on contraception in India, Nayantara talks about the multilayered causes and effects that science can have on our bodies. She gives examples of how the intended use of certain technologies create unintended logics, and instead of emancipating its users, further subjugate them. Nayantara challenges us with difficult questions: How to ensure that brown bodies do not become scapegoats in the discourse of climate change? Who creates AI that look like tiny barbies and speak like subjugated women? Should we not ask more of technology? At the end we ask Nayantara to give advice to pharmaceutical companies on how to do better.”
Click here to listen to Rebecca’s podcast. From Radio New Zealand:
Contemporary Feminism: A panel discussion about art and science.
“Prof. Anne Noble: There are cultural structures which do position science over here, and humanities and arts over there. There is this kind of imaginary divide.
Kim Hill: It’s not an imaginary divide, though, is it? It’s a divide that says that unless there’s evidence, then this cannot be true. Whereas in the arts, they’re saying, “we don’t care about evidence, imagine if this might be true.”
Prof. Anne Noble: Art and science are not the same. They’re parallel modes of enquiry that bump up against each other. They’ll argue. They’ll explode. There’ll be chaos. Science is not so comfortable with that because it’s always looking for certainty of outcome. And we do not invest I think enough in this space where we can have much more engagement of artists, scientists, humanities scholars together forming new kinds of questions to ask.
Dr Siouxsie Wiles: I disagree with the premise that scientists are looking for certainty. Maybe that’s true until you start doing experiments. And then you realise the minute you do an experiment, that not only did it not answer the question you asked, but it opened up ten other questions. And so actually, all you have done is realise how little you knew about the thing that you were starting to study. In getting to that understanding, you realise how little you understand.
Prof. Anne Noble: But that’s not the public perception of science.”