Led by the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, this international seminar series features speakers from the University of Newcastle alongside some of the biggest international scholars in sociology, digital humanities, communications, media studies, and education, responding to key social issues of our time: automation, democracy, wellness and conspiracies, material inequalities, and science and nature, and youth digital identities. The series is designed to showcase the importance of social science research in leading responses to these issues.
“Culture” is often equated with all things human, and “nature” with the external environment; distinguished from each other as if they were two separate realms of reality. This idea stemmed from modernist ideals of progress, where nature and ‘the environment’ were framed as separate distinct from humans as something to exploit or dominate, external to human endeavours, or seen as an escape from the ‘real world’ of culture - a place to relax outside of the pressures of work. This separation has led to some of the existential challenges we face today including climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, mass extinction events, and waste and pollution. This seminar presents work that shatters the false distinction between nature and culture and troubles lay perceptions of human practices as separate from the apparent wilds of nature. These presentations challenge us to think differently about the natureculture entanglements that arise in everyday life, and to consider how narratives of humanity’s dominance over the ‘natural world’ can be overturned to address the environmental and social challenges that they have generated.
Mary Lou Rassmussen (ANU) and Celia Roberts (ANU): Estrogens as naturecultures
Ben Matthews (University of Newcastle): Fear of Synthesis and the Unseen: the Wild Yeast Zoo citizen science slash start-up
Gavin Smith (ANU): Rewilding Sociology? How sociology can contribute to conservation
Estrogens as naturecultures Mary Lou Rassmussen (ANU) and Celia Roberts (ANU)
We have recently begun a three year study of estrogen experiments in laboratories, medical clinics and in the community. The third subproject will track ‘lay’ estrogen knowledges and practices through qualitative interviews and textual analysis of websites, apps, social media postings and educational materials and consider how they engage and challenge formal scientific and biomedical accounts of hormonal action, sex/gender, health and wellbeing. Reporting on an exploratory pilot for this subproject, this paper discusses where and how estrogens appeared as an actor across eight social media platforms (Aug-Sept 2024). We analyse 67 posts spanning a wide range of practices related to gender transition, menopause, mental and physical health, tracing in each case what estrogen is said to do, and how forms of expertise circulate. Posts were classified into four content categories: gender affirmation, DIY estrogen, medical advice and alternative medicine. Across these categories, estrogens appear as exemplary naturecultures, troubling their conventional figuration as messengers of (biological) sex.
Mary Lou Rasmussen is Professor, Research School of Social Sciences at ANU. Their research focuses on building transdisciplinary understandings of reproduction, sexuality, and gender across diverse lifeworlds. Rasmussen is co-editor, with Louisa Allen, of the Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education (2016) and the Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education (2024) (Palgrave) and has co/authored Reproduction, Kin and Climate Crisis: Making Bushfire Babies (Bristol, 2023); Queer Generations: sexual citizenship and LGBTQ youth in Australia (forthcoming Bloomsbury). Currently she’s collaborating on two ARC Discovery projects, Experimenting with Estrogen and Locating LGBTIQ+ Youth in the Archives.
Celia Roberts is Professor in the School of Sociology at ANU, working on hormones, embodiment and reproduction. Her most recent books are Hormonal Theory: A rebellious glossary (2024, Bloomsbury Press), a co-edited collection of social analyses of a wide range of hormones, and (with Mary Lou Rasmussen, Louisa Allen and Rebecca Williamson), Reproduction, Kin and Climate Crisis: Making bushfire babies (2023, Bristol UP), a qualitative study of reproduction during the 2019-20 Australian bushfires. She is currently working on the translation of epigenetics into antenatal care in Australia.
Fear of Synthesis and the Unseen: the Wild Yeast Zoo citizen science slash start-up Ben Matthews (University of Newcastle)
Wild Yeast Zoo is a citizen science-driven biotech startup that explores the untapped potential of microbial biodiversity. This presentation examines the challenges created by the false dichotomy between culture and nature and how this division complicates public engagement with microbial ecologies. Despite their foundational role in ecosystems and human health, microbes are often overlooked or misunderstood, in part because they challenge dominant cultural narratives that separate the human from the natural. Synthetic biology and microbial engineering introduce new tensions into this dialectic, blurring boundaries between “natural” and “designed” organisms. Wild Yeast Zoo addresses this complexity by positioning citizen science as a bridge—engaging publics directly in the discovery and application of microbial biodiversity. By involving communities in sampling, characterising, and applying native microbes, Wild Yeast Zoo reframes microbes not as abstract scientific objects but as tangible, culturally and ecologically significant agents. This presentation explores how this approach confronts public scepticism and environmental ambivalence. It highlights the epistemological and ethical challenges of reimagining microbes as both cultural and biological actors while maintaining scientific rigor and ethical guard rails. Drawing from experiences in building a public-facing microbial library and partnering with First Nations communities, the presentation argues that overcoming the culture-nature divide is essential for building meaningful engagement with microbial ecologies and unlocking the full potential of synthetic biology for sustainable innovation.
Dr. Benjamin Matthews is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Newcastle, and a lab-coat owning synthetic biology researcher and co-founder of Wild Yeast Zoo, a biotech startup combining citizen science and microbial bioprospecting to drive sustainable innovation. He is an AI with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and leads strategy and communications at Wild Yeast Zoo. His work focuses on transdisciplinary research projects, bridging the gap between science and public engagement, particularly in the fields of microbial ecology and synthetic biology.
Wilding Sociology: how sociology can contribute to conservation Gavin Smith (ANU)
Sociology has traditionally and disproportionately focused on analysing the practices of humans, in the social and material sense. Less attention has been given to the agency and sociality of non-human actors such as animals, ecosystems and environmental forces, and their complex and dynamic interrelationships. This seminar takes a sociological perspective to reflect on nine years of intricate work with and for venomous snakes in The Bush Capital of Australia. This has entailed both removing and relocating hundreds of venomous snakes from human dwellings where they are seen as risk flows, as well as providing care for sick and injured snakes and doing hundreds of community snake education events. It also incorporates extensive empirical research over four years on the habits of these animals including how they make use of habitat and respond to being translocated to a new and unfamiliar environment, as well as collecting biometric and genetic data from individual specimens to analyse population structures. In doing these different works over time, we consider what can be learned from the representation and treatment of snakes in Australian society? In what ways is urban milieu both amenable and hostile to certain natures? And how might harmful outcomes be reduced?
We address these questions by exploring the precarious position of snakes on Australia’s urban edges and, from this analysis, begin envisaging a conservation approach better suited for the Anthropocene. We contemplate the power of ‘listening’ to wildlife and the contribution of co-existence education programs and practices that take a holistic and relational ontology in challenging narratives and sentiments that render snakes, and other organisms like them, alien; and thereby killable (Colombino and Giaccaria 2016). These approaches envisage more inclusive, multispecies futures and function to decolonise and normalise snakes as valued inhabitants of urban ecosystems.
Gavin Smith is an Associate Professor and Head of Sociology at the Australian National University. He is also a Director of the Surveillance Studies Network. His research has mainly examined the social impacts of surveillance technologies, looking at the intersubjective meanings ascribed to everyday practices of watching and being watched. In recent times, his research has focused on the ambiguous figure of the snake in Australian society. This is a double-edged project examining social and cultural perceptions of snakes, both historically and in the contemporary period, but also how humans and other species engage with these animals in everyday life. Building on the sociality of snakes, the second component of the research involves conducting snake ecology research and tracking a sample of Eastern brown snakes (Pseudonaja textilis) in Canberra to better determine habitat use and movement profiles post-release. Contact: gavin.smith@anu.edu.au
The University of Newcastle acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands within our footprint areas: Awabakal, Darkinjung, Biripai, Worimi, Wonnarua, and Eora Nations. We also pay respect to the wisdom of our Elders past and present.
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