scientist and the myth of the heroic individual, as these appear in Frontiers of Science, leave little room for women as holders-of knowledge to appear. In the first part of the talk I demonstrate how ‘women’s’ knowledge (cooking, mothering) is placed in contrast with scientific knowledge in the Frontiers of Science strips, and in the second part of the paper I use Sandra Harding’s concepts of weak and strong objectivity to further discuss the ways that the myth of the objective scientist excluded particular women scientists from an influential popularization that was published in newspapers around the world for nearly twenty years. Maureen Burns is a lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Queensland and is currently working on a history of science popularization in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s.
‘Implied embodiment in popular evolutionary science texts’ Jamie Milton Freestone
DAY 3 / 1600A
Evolutionary biology forms the basis of many popular science texts, sometimes explicitly in texts about evolution, sometimes implicitly as in texts about microbiology, human genetic modification, or cognitive neuroscience. I perform a textual analysis of examples from the genre and identify a latent message of augmentation and embodiment through deep time. In this paper I argue that the use of the aesthetic of the sublime – via explanations of the ‘evolutionary epic’ – entails an attitude of new materiality that assumes a breakdown of barriers between the subject and the object and between the interiority of the human genome and the ‘outside’ environment. Jamie Freestone is a PhD candidate in English literature at the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. He is researching the aesthetic of the sublime in popular science texts.
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