Articles by Jaya Keaney
Body & Society, 2022
Some Indigenous Australians have embraced developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and... more Some Indigenous Australians have embraced developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and epigenetic discourses to highlight the legacies of slow violence in a settler colonial context. Despite important differences between Indigenous and scientific knowledges, some Indigenous scholars are positioning DOHaD and epigenetics as a resource to benefit their communities. This article argues that time plays a crucial role of brokering disparate knowledge spaces in Indigenous discourses of postgenomics, with both Indigenous cosmological frames and DOHaD/epigenetics centring a circular temporal model. Drawing on interview data with scientists who work in Indigenous health, and broader ethnographic work in Indigenous Australian contexts where epigenetics is deployed, this article explores how different circularities of space and time become entangled to co-produce narratives of historical trauma. We use the concept of biocircularity to understand the complex ways that Indigenous and postgenomic temporalities are separated and connected, circling each other to produce a postcolonial articulation of postgenomics as a model of collective embodiment and distributed responsibility.
Trends in Biotechnology, 2022
Technological advances in bioengineering, especially in microphysiological systems and organoids,... more Technological advances in bioengineering, especially in microphysiological systems and organoids, are changing the way in which placental tissue is used and perceived. These advances raise important questions surrounding consent, privacy, biobanking, and research ethics. We explore emerging technologies which use placental tissue and the pressing associated bioethical
concerns they raise.
Science, Technology & Human Values, 2022
In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the womb is often figured as a holding environment that br... more In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the womb is often figured as a holding environment that brings the child of commissioning parents to fruition but does not shape fetal identity. This article probes the racial imaginary of such a figuration-what I term the "nonracializing womb"where gestation is seen as peripheral to racial transmission. Drawing on feminist science studies frameworks and data from interviews with parents who commissioned surrogates, this article traces the cultural politics of the nonracializing womb, positioning it as an index for broader understandings of race, reproductive labor, and kinship that hinge on nuclear and biogenetic forms. It then problematizes this figure of gestation by engaging emerging research on environmental epigenetics, which offers a lively model of pregnancy as shaping fetal biology, blurring the lines between surrogate and fetus. I argue that epigenetics offers a resource to reimagine gestation as a racializing process, by theorizing race not as solely genetic, but as relational, socio-environmental, and forged through distributed kinship lineages.
The mixed race subject is increasingly emerging in popular Australian media as a poster child of ... more The mixed race subject is increasingly emerging in popular Australian media as a poster child of multiculturalism, entangled with post-racial discourses. This dominant representation perpetuates reductive understandings of mixed race experience rooted in compulsory optimism and the erasure of history, which in turn bolster exclusionary imaginings of Australian national identity. I seek alternatives to these constructions through an analysis of the 2004 Australian film Peaches, a markedly understudied text, which centres the coming of age of mixed race protagonist Steph. I adopt Eve Sedgwick’s ‘reparative reading’ approach, which enables generative modes of analysis that seek to imagine new alternatives through textual critique. I focus on two key filmic sites – the ambivalent affects circulated by Steph, and the haunting queer temporality pervading the narrative. I argue that these two sites hold the potential for complex, open-ended understandings of mixed race identity, and in turn, modes of national identity that can re-centre unresolved histories and contested dynamics of race in Australia.
Public History Review
After the fall of the Suharto regime in 1988, public debates over the nature of history prolifera... more After the fall of the Suharto regime in 1988, public debates over the nature of history proliferated. While focusing on a number of key national events, most notably the 1965 coup and the killing of over half-a-million people, these debates have raised critical issues over the role or potential role of public history in contemporary Indonesian society. Questions of historical authority are paramount as Indonesian historians, public intellectuals and politicians struggle with a deeply entrenched historical paradigm and narratives of the old ‘New Order’ which continues to inform history in schools, cultural institutions, the media, literature, personal narratives, public rituals and the academy. This paradigm was based on an unquestioning acceptance of official accounts of the past. The demise of the New Order has left a historiographical vacuum which individuals and groups from a broad range of perspectives are trying to fill. Some, like Professor Azumardi Aza, are seeking to straddl...
What Is Public History Globally?
Chapters in edited collections by Jaya Keaney
Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment, 2021
Policy papers and reports by Jaya Keaney
ADI Policy Briefs, 2020
The global fertility industry has grown rapidly in recent years and is expected to be worth A$63 ... more The global fertility industry has grown rapidly in recent years and is expected to be worth A$63 billion by 2025 (Business Wire, 2018). In addition to Australia’s fast-growing fertility sector, many Australians travel overseas to access fertility care elsewhere. Australians pursue cross-border reproductive travel for several reasons, including side-stepping domestic bans on commercial surrogacy and non-anonymous gamete donation. COVID-19 has dramatically altered the state of fertility treatment worldwide and has intensified existing legal, regulatory, and social challenges. While data collection on the impacts of COVID-19 on fertility care remains limited, an intensifying economic recession and recent news of Australians unable to complete cross-border arrangements present policy questions that demand urgent attention.This paper proposes three policy directions to improve fertility care in Australia:
Books by Jaya Keaney
Papers by Jaya Keaney
International indigenous policy journal, Mar 1, 2024
Environmental epigenetics is a fast-growing field of scientific research attracting interest from... more Environmental epigenetics is a fast-growing field of scientific research attracting interest from key stakeholders in Indigenous health internationally, including researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and advocacy organisations. It is the study of how various external factors, including food, stress, and toxins, alter genetic expression, and could be biologically passed down to children (and potentially grandchildren). This article explores the growing interest in epigenetics in Indigenous health and social policy fields in Australia and identifies the key implications and challenges for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The authors advocate for the urgent development of epigenetic research guidelines in Australia and beyond that centre Indigenous sovereignty. Keywords Epigenetics, developmental origins of health and disease, intergenerational trauma, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, health Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. 1 A note on terminology: in line with currently accepted usage, this article uses the term "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander" when referring to the Indigenous peoples of Australia, and "Indigenous" when referring to the Indigenous Peoples of more than one country. We acknowledge that the terms "First Nations" and "First Peoples" are increasing in their use in Australia and internationally. They are used in this article when referring to publications by organisations that use these terms in their titles.
Duke University Press eBooks, Jul 6, 2021
Oxford Handbooks Online
Public history in Indonesia today faces considerable challenges. Despite the downfall of the New ... more Public history in Indonesia today faces considerable challenges. Despite the downfall of the New Order regime, its nationalist history program and agenda remain powerful in the culture. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the construction and use of authorized monuments and memorials. Monuments and memorials are evocative and affective; they promote and perpetuate emotional bonds. Drawing on familiar materials and symbols, they are aimed at particular audiences in specific contexts, and they are intended to be efficacious. As objects with the potential to affect communities or whole societies, they are also contestable. This chapter draws on what are arguably two of the most prominent public monuments and memorials in Indonesia—the Sacred Pancasila Monument (Monumen Pancasila Sakti), which speaks primarily to an internal or domestic audience, and the memorial to the victims of the Bali bombing in Kuta, which is primarily aimed at an international audience.
Body & Society, 2022
Some Indigenous Australians have embraced developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and... more Some Indigenous Australians have embraced developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and epigenetic discourses to highlight the legacies of slow violence in a settler colonial context. Despite important differences between Indigenous and scientific knowledges, some Indigenous scholars are positioning DOHaD and epigenetics as a resource to benefit their communities. This article argues that time plays a crucial role of brokering disparate knowledge spaces in Indigenous discourses of postgenomics, with both Indigenous cosmological frames and DOHaD/epigenetics centring a circular temporal model. Drawing on interview data with scientists who work in Indigenous health, and broader ethnographic work in Indigenous Australian contexts where epigenetics is deployed, this article explores how different circularities of space and time become entangled to co-produce narratives of historical trauma. We use the concept of biocircularity to understand the complex ways that Indigenous and ...
Trends in Biotechnology, 2021
Technological advances in bioengineering, especially in microphysiological systems and organoids,... more Technological advances in bioengineering, especially in microphysiological systems and organoids, are changing the way in which placental tissue is used and perceived. These advances raise important questions surrounding consent, privacy, biobanking, and research ethics. We explore emerging technologies which use placental tissue and the pressing associated bioethical concerns they raise.
Health Sociology Review
COVID-19 responses have cast a spotlight on the uneven impacts of public health policy with parti... more COVID-19 responses have cast a spotlight on the uneven impacts of public health policy with particular populations or sites targeted for intervention. Perhaps the starkest example in Australia was the ‘hard’ lockdown of nine public housing complexes in inner-city Melbourne from 4 to 18 July 2020, where residents were fully confined to their homes. These complexes are home to diverse migrant communities and the lockdown drew public criticism for unfairly stigmatising ethnic minorities. This article draws on media articles published during the lockdown and the Victorian Ombudsman’s subsequent investigation to explore the implications of broad, top-down public health measures for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. Drawing on Lea’s (2020) conceptualisation of policy ecology, we analyse the lockdown measures and community responses to explore the normative assumptions underpinning health policy mechanisms, constituting ‘target populations’ in narrow, exclusionary terms. We argue that the lockdown measures and use of police as compliance officers positioned tower residents as risky subjects in risky places. Tracing how such subject positions are produced, and resisted at the grassroots level, we highlight how policy instruments are not neutral interventions, but rather instantiate classed and racialised patterns of exclusion, reinforcing pervasive social inequalities in the name of public health.
Science, Technology, & Human Values, Mar 30, 2022
In this Introduction, we present a collection of articles under the topic “the reproductive bodie... more In this Introduction, we present a collection of articles under the topic “the reproductive bodies of postgenomics.” Through individual and collective research, the articles explore—sociologically, ethnographically, and philosophically—how bioscience in the postgenomic age is changing our understanding of reproductive bodies, and more broadly, how it is challenging existing ideas of heredity, embodiment, kinship, and identity. Feminist and postcolonial theories of technoscience are at the heart of this collection, and our aim is to further biosocial thinking while being cognizant that practices of postgenomics also continue to reproduce deterministic paradigms. The concepts of “knowledge,” “experience,” and “justice” form the reference points animating our investigations. We bring these concepts into conversation with one another to disentangle how postgenomics operate differently on the reproductive body, namely on the levels of practice, discourse, and norms. This is an important exercise as it will enable social science and humanities scholars to evaluate the political capacities of postgenomics for the future study of reproduction.
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Articles by Jaya Keaney
concerns they raise.
Chapters in edited collections by Jaya Keaney
Policy papers and reports by Jaya Keaney
Books by Jaya Keaney
Papers by Jaya Keaney
concerns they raise.