School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemAutomating Digital Afterlives(Oxford University Press, 2021-08-26)The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTen millennia of hepatitis B virus evolution(AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE, 2021-10-08)Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~20,000 and 12,000 years ago, with the virus present in European and South American hunter-gatherers during the early Holocene. After the European Neolithic transition, Mesolithic HBV strains were replaced by a lineage likely disseminated by early farmers that prevailed throughout western Eurasia for ~4000 years, declining around the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The only remnant of this prehistoric HBV diversity is the rare genotype G, which appears to have reemerged during the HIV pandemic.
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ItemUrakami memory and the two popes: The disrupting of an abstracted nuclear discourse(MDPI AG, 2021-11-01)Since 1945, official Catholic discourse around nuclear weapons has condemned their existence on the one hand and supported them as deterrents on the other. This paper argues the largely abstracted discourse on nuclear weapons within the World Church has been disrupted by voices of Urakami in Nagasaki since at least 1981, as the Vatican has re-considered both memory and Catholic treatments of the bombing of this city since the end of World War II. On 9 August 1945, a plutonium A-bomb, nicknamed ‘Fat Man’, was detonated by the United States over the northern suburb of Nagasaki known as Urakami. Approximately 8500 Catholics were killed by the deployment of the bomb in this place that was once known as the Rome of the East. Many years on, two popes visited Nagasaki, the first in 1981 and the second in 2019. Throughout the period from John Paul II’s initial visit to Pope Francis’s visit in 2019, the Catholic Church’s official stance on nuclear weapons evolved significantly. Pope John Paul II’s contribution to the involvement in peace discourses of Catholics who had suffered the bombing attack in Nagasaki has been noted by scholars previously, but we should not assume influence in 1981 was unidirectional. Drawing upon interviews conducted in the Catholic community in Nagasaki between 2014 and 2019, and by reference to the two papal visits, this article re-evaluates the ongoing potentialities and concomitant weaknesses of religious discourse. Such discourses continue to exert an influence on international relations in the enduring atomic age.
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ItemRestoring Catharine Macaulay's Enlightenment Republicanism?(Polish Academy of Science, 2021)Can Catharine Macaulay’s enlightenment, democratic, republicanism be justified from the point of view of contemporary naturalism? Naturalist accounts of the grounds of political authority tend to be realist and pessimistic, foreclosing the possibility of the promise of enlightenment. Macaulay’s utopian political philosophy, in contrast, relies heavily on belief in a good God, whose existence underpins the existence of universal moral truths and the possibility of moral and political progress. This paper attempts a restoration of her optimistic utopianism, in a reconciliation, grounded in a revision of natural law, of naturalist and utopian attitudes to political theory, thus hopefully making her republicanism serviceable for a secular age. The guiding question is whether, or to what extent, a re-articulation of her idea of a representative democracy, grounded in a social contract, can retrieve something of the moral underpinnings of her enlightenment republicanism, without falling back, as she did, on suspect theological assumptions. The answer developed proposes that our evolution as social creatures has implied the development of innate dispositions to conform to socially sanctioned moral principles. Motivation to obey such principles was evolutionarily adaptive, for moral laws offered solutions to the types of tragedy of the commons situations in which humans found themselves. This answer allows for a naturalistic reconciliation of sentimentalist and rationalist accounts of morality. Sentimentalists are right to point to the fact that moral sentiments are distinct from calculations of long term self interest, but rationalists are correct, in so far as the evolution of moral sentiments benefitted the long term survival of communities. Since the purpose of moral principles remains to provide solutions to the tragedy of the commons or prisoner’s dilemma type situations that actually face us, moral principles are subject to rational appraisal. Democratic republicanism enriched by education, freedom of the press, and other civil liberties, then recommends itself as the most reliable means for developing rationally justifiable moral principles and laws suited to solving the evolving tragedy of the commons type situations that face us.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Nuclear White Elephant(Arena Printing and Publications Pty. Ltd, 2021)
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ItemPost-truth dystopia: Huxleyan distraction or Orwellian control?(Routledge, 2021-01-01)This book engages with post-truth as a problem of societal order and for scholarly analysis. It claims that post-truth discourse is more deeply entangled with main Western imaginations of knowledge societies than commonly recognised.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCreating an Army for the Afterlife(ABC National Radio, Hobart, 2021)The Terracotta Army was constructed to accompany the tomb of China's First Emperor as an afterlife guard. Paul McIntyre spoke with archaeologist, Professor Tonia Eckfeld, who has been studying the ancient clay warriors for over three decades.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableJames Stirling, first governor of Western Australia and imperial investor(Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery Project in collaboration with National Centre for Biography, 2021-03-18)Admiral James Stirling arrived on Noongar land in 1829 to proclaim it the British colony of Western Australia. Officially, he represented the British government. Unofficially, he represented the commercial interests of his family, a collection of British naval officers, East India Company administrators and directors, imperial merchants, shipping magnates, their wives and their descendants. Stirling pursued the colony as an investment opportunity, first with the Colonial Office and then through land selections, the manipulation of market conditions and private capital-raising schemes. This pursuit was shaped by three, interrelated social phenomena. Firstly, numerous strands of his family had become wealthy through transatlantic and Caribbean slavery. Secondly, British government incentives for establishing a colony on the western side of Australia strengthened at the same time as it was shifting away from the ‘slave colonies’ and certain forms of unfree labour. And third, this shift placed pressure on the Stirling family to secure new income streams to maintain affluence and power. This seminar will explore these dynamics and ask: in what ways does the intergenerational biographical method expand and enliven, or alternatively risk reducing, our understanding of the legacies of British slavery in the Australian settler colonies?