The Dyason Lecture – Protestant Origins of Modern Science?
6:00pm Wednesday 3 December, Terrace Room, Level 6, Llew Edwards Building, University of Queensland
Already in the seventeenth century the sequence of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific revolution led some to speculate about how these ‘dual reformations’ were related. Ever since, various thinkers have posited causal links between them. This lecture will consider a range of such possible connections – the Protestant ‘ethic’, challenges to tradition, new interpretative approaches to scripture and nature, ideas about the earthly vocation, and eschatological ideas that focused on material improvement. It will conclude with a consideration of the ways in which ‘Protestant’ versions of history, in a secularized form, came to be incorporated in Enlightenment stories of progress and ironically became implicated in the construction of science-religion conflict narratives in the nineteenth century.
About the speaker: Peter Harrison is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. He was previously the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. From 2015-21 he was an Australian Laureate Fellow. He has published extensively on the philosophical, scientific and religious thought of the early modern period, and is one of the world’s leading scholars on the historical relations between science and religion.
Plenary – Thinking with Medicinal Cannabis
Hannah Adler (Griffith University)
9:00 am Friday 5 December, Room 14-132
Scholars have noted that there is a heterogeneity attached to cannabis; it is not a single nor stable object and rather exists in a variety of registers and understandings. Cannabis can be known as a recreational drug or narcotic, a medicine, a product of scientific exploration, a plant, an agricultural product, or as hemp, and with this follows unique and distinct policies. However, even certain identities of cannabis, such as ‘medicinal cannabis’, remain complex as its uses, understandings, and ontologies have shifted throughout history and across the globe. In this plenary, I focus on ‘medicinal cannabis’ as an object of exploration.
I chart how medicinal cannabis has shifted ontologically over time; socially, culturally, and in science and medicine. In opening by providing a historical overview and focusing on some key moments and representations in the history of medicinal cannabis, we can see the different knowledges of the plant medicine and how they were constructed. Then, in turning attention to modern uses and representations of medicinal cannabis in Australia, we can further understand how some ontologies of cannabis ‘stick’, while new understandings emerge. Importantly, I explore how ontologies of medicinal cannabis have been constructed by certain actors, but also how medicinal cannabis works to construct those who use it. By drawing on my own media research, interviews, and case studies, I explain how in both modern Australia and throughout history, medicinal cannabis has contributed to the shaping of subjectivities and people, while different actors (such as users) have also contributed to our understanding of the medicine itself. In this sense, I argue that medicinal cannabis remains in flux in Australia, contingent on context, time, place, medicine, science, and society. Ultimately, we can understand medicinal cannabis heterogeneously, and as a way to think deeply through power relations and inequalities.
Dr Hannah Adler is a Lecturer in Communication at Griffith University and a member of the Centre for Social and Cultural Research. She is an interdisciplinary early-career researcher, with a focus on exploring diseases and treatments related to human pain and suffering through communicative and sociological lenses. She has a particular interest in complementary and alternative medicine and reproductive health. Hannah has published widely across disciplines on medicinal cannabis and endometriosis, often working in interdisciplinary teams that bridge communication, sociology, and healthcare. In 2024, she was awarded the AANZCA Christopher Newell Prize for her work in health communication.
Plenary – Hearing the Nineteenth Century: Literature, Science, and the Culture of Sound
Melissa Dickson (University of Queensland)
9:00 am Thursday 4 December, Room 14-132
The ability to apprehend – and thus to measure, record, and quantify – the movements of sound and its effects on both material objects and human bodies was a central preoccupation of the burgeoning science of acoustics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through Ernst Chladni’s visualisation of soundwaves as patterns in sand, to Thomas Young’s tuning forks and Charles Wheatstone’s kaleidophone, and the later experiments of John Tyndall, sound itself became a new and exciting part of the material world. It moved through space in waves and effected visible change; it had a material trace that could be graphed and analysed in order to reveal previously unheard and unseen relationships. As acoustics emerged as a new experimental science, it promised to render the invisible audible: to trace sound as a physical force moving through air, matter, and the body. Yet the more precisely scientists measured vibration and resonance, the more they became aware of what remained immeasurable. The new acoustic culture of the period revealed an unstable space between sound and silence, a realm of inaudible motion that invited both scientific speculation and imaginative wonder. This lecture explores how nineteenth-century science and literature sought to hear what lay beyond the limits of the human ear. It traces how efforts to measure vibration and resonance also generated new metaphors for sympathy, sensitivity, and the porous boundaries of the self. Across the century, writers and experimenters alike confronted the “unheard” as a space of possibility, from the imperceptible frequencies accessible only to animals or instruments, to the speculative communications of spiritualism and psychical research, and to the ambient din of the industrial city that seemed to overwhelm human nerves and attention. Drawing on figures such as George Eliot, Charles Dickens, George Henry Lewes, and the acousticians of the Royal Institution, I argue that that the nineteenth century’s fascination with sound opened up a new language for thinking about perception, embodiment, and unseen connection. Listening became a way of imagining the invisible: of asking where human knowledge ends, and what vibrates just beyond its reach.
Melissa Dickson is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Queensland, where she researches and teaches across the long nineteenth century. She leads the UK team of the UKRI funded the Media and Epidemics Project, and her current research focuses on the reception and transformation of nineteenth-century epidemics across literature, science, and medicine. She is the author of Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019), co-author of Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (2019), and co-editor of Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Her new monograph Acoustics in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science: Listening at the Threshold is now available from Cambridge University Press.
Plenary – Agents, Instruments, and Objectivity: Phenomenology for the Foundations of Physics
Peter Evans (University of Queensland)
9:00 am Wednesday 3 December, Room 14-132
Physics never observes from nowhere. Indeed, quantum theory makes observation itself a target of explanation. This talk sketches an account of quantum events built on the simple thought that experiments are structured ways of seeing and doing: the structures that make outcomes publicly shareable and stable are not fixed by the quantum formalism alone. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—where a stable world is underpinned by embodied, skilful, intersubjective agency—and extending Steven French’s phenomenological approach to quantum mechanics, I treat agents’ bodies and instruments as the vehicles of perception and action that articulate what can count as a `measurement outcome’. I make the case in favour of an agent-centric notion of objectivity suited to quantum practice and outline how this union of phenomenology and foundations reorients the measurement question, and why taking standpoint seriously need not cost us objectivity.
Dr Peter Evans is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Queensland specialising in the philosophy of physics. His research interests include time, causation, and agency in modern physics, especially quantum foundations, and the epistemology and methodology of science, especially analogue experimentation. As such, his research is informed by the latest experimental and theoretical results from the physical sciences. He is currently Lead CI on an ARC DP, “The View From Somewhere: embodied agents and the quantum perspective”, exploring the role that agency plays both in the physics of embodied learning as well as quantum theory.