Matthew Kearnes
Biographic Data
| ID | 81002 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Kearnes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Kearnes |
| SIGNATURE | KEARNES M |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6267-9571 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1361 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
What Can an STS Journal Do?
Arts of noticing unloved others: Reflections on the importance of methods, meetings, and affect in cannabis policy
A growing body of scholarly work acknowledges the importance of attending to the entanglements of human and more-than-human lives, including the importance of affect for how we come to understand other organisms. However, to date, little work has been done on the affective aspects of how more-than-human beings come to be understood in policy. Environmental humanities approaches including expert engagement with affective storytelling, attention to…
On Peer Review and Exchanges Unseen: Thank You to Our Reviewers 2023 and 2024
On Peer Review and Exchanges Unseen: Thank You to Our Reviewers 2023 and 2024
Regulating the Plant Versus Regulating the Drug: Learning From Backyard Cannabis Cultivation in the Australian Capital Territory
The cultivation of cannabis has been shaped by underpinning social, political, and economic dynamics over thousands of years. Recently, a new wave of regulatory reform has opened up legal and decriminalized ways of growing, obtaining, and using cannabis plants and products. Yet in some locations, these reforms continue to be informed by conceptualizations of cannabis as “drug” invoking links to criminality. The dominant figuring of cannabis as “d…
Current Canons and Canonical Currents
Current Canons and Canonical Currents
Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in Science and Technology Studies (STS)
Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in Science and Technology Studies (STS)
Thank you to our reviewers for 2021 and 2022
Converging old and new carbon frontiers in northern Australia
Over the past 15 years, international climate policy and governance practice have shifted from a linear model of carbon emissions management to a circular model. Whereas the former primarily focused on reducing absolute emissions, the latter focuses on balancing emissions sources and sinks. Australia, a major global exporter of ‘old’ carbon resources such as coal, has actively embraced circular carbon policies and their related ‘new’ carbon resou…
The right to repairable energy: A political ecology of off-grid solar repair in Zambia
The sale of off-grid solar products in Zambia has grown rapidly over the past decade, with around 1 million small-scale solar products sold between 2018 and 2022. However, these products, which are promoted as a means for energy-poor populations to access basic energy services, tend to have short working lives. This poses significant ethical and infrastructural challenges in terms of solar e-waste that the off-grid solar industry and nation state…
Geographies of Covid-19
Photo credit: Fusion Medical Animation. Note: This editorial is for a virtual issue the journal editorial team has curated with Dallas Rogers and Matthew Kearns, who have written this piece. See here for the suite of papers in the collection. We are currently working on a second series on this crucially important topic. [Editor-in-Chief] The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 has precipitated profound social, economic, and political disr…
Latour and After, or What Comes After Latour
What Is an STS Contribution Now
Navigating the grey: Experiences of incremental cannabis reform in Australia
It's professional but it's personal”: Participation, personal connection, and sustained disagreement in drug policy reform
What does a right to repair tell us about our relationship with technology
This article examines the recommendations of the recent Productivity Commission Inquiry regarding the right to repair through the lens of social issues surrounding the right to repair movement. It describes the right to repair movement in Australia and globally and examines which repair practices are considered important by the Commission, and the limitations of the Commission’s preoccupation with existing repair markets. It also discusses changi…
Established Tables and Emergent Huddles: Exploring the Processes of Participation Associated With the Policy Changes to Opioid Pharmacotherapy Treatment in Australia in the Context of Covid-19
In this paper we document and analyze emergent participatory processes in drug policy, focusing on the relations between established modes of engagement and emergent participatory formats. We do this through analysis of a case example, attending to policy changes to opioid pharmacotherapy treatment in the context of COVID-19 in Australia. Semistructured interviews ( n = 22) were undertaken between August 2020 and March 2021 with people closely in…
Reimagining Health as a ‘Flow on Effect’ of Biomedical Innovation: Research Policy as a Site of State Activism
The afterlives of off-grid solar: The dynamics of repair and e-waste in Malawi
The uneven distribution of futurity: Slow emergencies and the event of Covid-19
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic strains conventional temporal imaginaries through which emergencies are typically understood and governed. Rather than a transparent and linear temporality, a smooth transition across the series event/disruption-response-post-event recovery, the pandemic moves in fits and starts, blurring the boundary between normalcy and emergency. This distended temporality brings into sharp relief other slow emergencies such as ra…
A Meeting Point for STS Interventions and Conversations
Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory
This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in ‘the material’ in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of ‘critical description’ with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in political and artistic practices, in order to address global ecological change. The chapters in this ed…
The promise of precision: Datafication in medicine, agriculture and education
This paper analyses how precision has become a ubiquitous prefix in medicine, agriculture and education. The accompanying imagination in each of these domains is that “data” will enable greater predictive accuracy through new sensors and interfaces. In this paper, we aim to provide insights regarding the ways in which precision assemblages function to augment and extend existing knowledge and data infrastructures, while also being underpinned by …
Becoming Reading Group: Reflections on assembling a collegiate, caring collective
In neoliberalising universities, collegial and collective practices such as reading groups are often positioned by students, staff and managers as less important than meeting individual KPIs (such as producing research publications, seeking research grants, or meeting the increasing demands of producing quality teaching outcomes.) However, reading groups can be vital for cultivating caring collectives and spaces of collegiality. In this paper we …
Remaking Participation in Science and Democracy
Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in public engagement with, and the democratization of, science and technology. Despite notable successes, such developments have often struggled to enhance public trust, avert crises of expertise and democracy, and build more socially responsive and responsible science and innovation. A central reason for this is that mainstream approaches to public engagement harbor what we call "res…
Slow emergencies: Temporality and the racialized biopolitics of emergency governance
How lives are governed through emergency is a critical issue for our time. In this paper, we build on scholarship on this issue by developing the concept of 'slow emergencies'. We do so to attune to situations of harm that call into question what forms of life can and should be secured by apparatuses of emergency governance. Through drawing together work on emergency and on racialization, we define 'slow emergencies' as situations marked by a) at…
On assemblages and geography
In this paper we explore what assemblage thinking offers social-spatial theory by asking what questions or problems assemblage responds to or opens up. Used variously as a concept, ethos and descriptor, assemblage thinking can be placed within the context of the recent 'relational turn' in human geography. In this context, we argue that assemblage thinking offers four things to contemporary social-spatial theory that, when taken together, provide…
Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment
Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science. In this paper we do two things. First, we add to the sense that urban living spaces involve much more than human worlds and are often prime sites for human and nonhuman ecologies. Second, we experiment with what is involved in taking these nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously and in prod…
Slow emergencies: Temporality and the racialized biopolitics of emergency governance
How lives are governed through emergency is a critical issue for our time. In this paper, we build on scholarship on this issue by developing the concept of 'slow emergencies'. We do so to attune to situations of harm that call into question what forms of life can and should be secured by apparatuses of emergency governance. Through drawing together work on emergency and on racialization, we define 'slow emergencies' as situations marked by a) at…
Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities
Welcome to the first volume of this new, international, open-access journal.Environmental Humanities aims to support and further a wide range of conversations on environmental issues in this time of growing awareness of the ecological and social challenges facing all life on earth.The field of environmental humanities is growing rapidly, both in research and teaching.In just the past few years, a number of research centres and undergraduate and p…
Nanotechnology, Governance, and Public Deliberation: What Role for the Social Sciences
In this article we argue that nanotechnology represents an extraordinary opportunity to build in a robust role for the social sciences in a technology that remains at an early, and hence undetermined, stage of development. We examine policy dynamics in both the United States and United Kingdom aimed at both opening up, and closing down, the role of the social sciences in nanotechnologies. We then set out a prospective agenda for the social scienc…
Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics
Geographies that matter--the rhetorical deployment of physicality
Jackson (2000) proposes a 'rematerialization' of social and cultural geography. He argues for the grounding of geographical analysis in the concrete world of actual physical objects. Examining the work of Jackson (2000) and Miller (1987, 1998) this paper interrogates this return to the physical. In particular, this paper argues that current articulations of physicality rely on a universal metaphysics of matter--positing matter as a universally un…
Remaking Participation in Science and Democracy
Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in public engagement with, and the democratization of, science and technology. Despite notable successes, such developments have often struggled to enhance public trust, avert crises of expertise and democracy, and build more socially responsive and responsible science and innovation. A central reason for this is that mainstream approaches to public engagement harbor what we call "res…
The uneven distribution of futurity: Slow emergencies and the event of Covid-19
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic strains conventional temporal imaginaries through which emergencies are typically understood and governed. Rather than a transparent and linear temporality, a smooth transition across the series event/disruption-response-post-event recovery, the pandemic moves in fits and starts, blurring the boundary between normalcy and emergency. This distended temporality brings into sharp relief other slow emergencies such as ra…
Earthly graves for environmental futures: Techno-burial practices
In this paper we explore contemporary investments in the underground. We argue that alongside excavation processes the subsurface the underground is increasingly being presented as site for the burial of toxic and radioactive waste and carbon dioxide. We explore two particular burial practices; the long-term disposal of industrial and toxic waste in deep geological repositories and the sequestration of carbon and greenhouse gases in soil. Across …
From Bio to Nano: Learning Lessons from the UK Agricultural Biotechnology Controversy
In this paper we develop an analysis of the public and political controversy which overtook genetically modified (GM) foods and crops in the UK in the 1990s and identify some key lessons for the fu
Why Solar Radiation Management Geoengineering and Democracy Won't Mix
In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging 'social constitution' of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: That the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institu…
Ecologies and Economies of Action-Sustainability, Calculations, and other Things
In ecological, environmental, and urban-regeneration terms, the participatory turn and the turn to action have been written about at length in both academic and official literatures. From neighbourhood renewal to lay ecologies, people are being 'given' all kinds of agency in the making of economy and ecology. Yet relatively little has been said regarding the financial organisation of this new populism, which is often achieved through calculation …
On Nanotechnology and Ambivalence: The Politics of Enthusiasm
Tools of the Trade: UK Research Intermediaries and the Politics of Impacts
Materialism and the politics of assemblage
In response to the commentaries on Anderson et al. (2012), the authors’ short response raises questions about, first, the status of materialism and realism in current debates around relations and relationality and, second, the implications of understanding assemblage as a particular kind of ethos for the politics of assemblage-based thinking
The promise of precision: Datafication in medicine, agriculture and education
This paper analyses how precision has become a ubiquitous prefix in medicine, agriculture and education. The accompanying imagination in each of these domains is that “data” will enable greater predictive accuracy through new sensors and interfaces. In this paper, we aim to provide insights regarding the ways in which precision assemblages function to augment and extend existing knowledge and data infrastructures, while also being underpinned by …
Rethinking the Final Frontier: Cosmo-Logics and an Ethic of Interstellar Flourishing
In recent years a range of corporate and governmental entities have made increasingly strident moves toward the establishment of an off-Earth mining industry, often touting an imminent “gold rush in space.” For many proponents these proposals are thoroughly entangled with an even more ambitious set of possibilities for a new age of human history in space that will include the exploration and eventual colonization of extraterrestrial environments.…
All things weird and scary’: Nanotechnology, theology and cultural resources
Nanotechnology is widely suggested to be fast becoming a defining technology of the twenty-first century. This ‘science of the very small’ has applications in areas from medicine to materials, and is predicted to have profound effects on social life. In this paper, we draw on a study of lay people's reflections on the ethics of nanotechnologies to focus on the talk of one group of participants, from a UK church. While we identify key themes which…
The afterlives of off-grid solar: The dynamics of repair and e-waste in Malawi
Seeing is Believing is Knowing: Towards a Critique of Pure Vision
What Is an STS Contribution Now
Introduction: (Re)Imagining Nanotechnology
For its proponents nanotechnology offers so much—unlimited and clean energy, targeted pharmaceuticals, intelligent textiles and self-organizing molecular machines. Bottom-up or top-down, the promis
Geographies of Covid-19
Photo credit: Fusion Medical Animation. Note: This editorial is for a virtual issue the journal editorial team has curated with Dallas Rogers and Matthew Kearns, who have written this piece. See here for the suite of papers in the collection. We are currently working on a second series on this crucially important topic. [Editor-in-Chief] The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 has precipitated profound social, economic, and political disr…
(Re)making matter: Design and selection
Seeing is Believing is Knowing: Towards a Critique of Pure Vision
Geographies that matter--the rhetorical deployment of physicality
Jackson (2000) proposes a 'rematerialization' of social and cultural geography. He argues for the grounding of geographical analysis in the concrete world of actual physical objects. Examining the work of Jackson (2000) and Miller (1987, 1998) this paper interrogates this return to the physical. In particular, this paper argues that current articulations of physicality rely on a universal metaphysics of matter--positing matter as a universally un…
Nanotechnology, Governance, and Public Deliberation: What Role for the Social Sciences
In this article we argue that nanotechnology represents an extraordinary opportunity to build in a robust role for the social sciences in a technology that remains at an early, and hence undetermined, stage of development. We examine policy dynamics in both the United States and United Kingdom aimed at both opening up, and closing down, the role of the social sciences in nanotechnologies. We then set out a prospective agenda for the social scienc…
Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment
Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science. In this paper we do two things. First, we add to the sense that urban living spaces involve much more than human worlds and are often prime sites for human and nonhuman ecologies. Second, we experiment with what is involved in taking these nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously and in prod…
Chaos and Control: Nanotechnology and the Politics of Emergence
This article looks at the strong links between Deleuze's molecular ontology and the fields of complexity and emergence, and argues that Deleuze's work implies a ‘philosophy of technology’ that is both open and dynamic. Following Simondon and von Uexküll, Deleuze suggests that technical objects are ontologically unstable, and are produced by processes of individuation and self-organization in complex relations with their environment. For Deleuze d…
Introduction: (Re)Imagining Nanotechnology
For its proponents nanotechnology offers so much—unlimited and clean energy, targeted pharmaceuticals, intelligent textiles and self-organizing molecular machines. Bottom-up or top-down, the promis
From Bio to Nano: Learning Lessons from the UK Agricultural Biotechnology Controversy
In this paper we develop an analysis of the public and political controversy which overtook genetically modified (GM) foods and crops in the UK in the 1990s and identify some key lessons for the fu
Nuclear Futures: Assessing Public Attitudes to New Nuclear Power
The nuclear debate has become once again a ‘live’ policy issue in UK national politics, with far-reaching implications for a diverse range of stakeholders. There is now a new policy rationale for the consideration of new-build nuclear power in the context of climate change and a low carbon economy. \nIn a rapidly evolving public policy context there is a strategic need for a clearer picture of public and community perceptions of nuclear power and…
On Nanotechnology and Ambivalence: The Politics of Enthusiasm
(Re)making matter: Design and selection
Geographies of nano‐technoscience
Posed between dream and reality, and suspended between the future and present, nanotechnology has been heralded as a technology that may define the twenty-first century. Based on claims of either the ability to precisely control and manipulate the material world at the nanoscale, or the ability to modulate living processes at the nanoscale, nanotechnology is said to promise a set of transformative applications that will disrupt established catego…
Ecologies and Economies of Action-Sustainability, Calculations, and other Things
In ecological, environmental, and urban-regeneration terms, the participatory turn and the turn to action have been written about at length in both academic and official literatures. From neighbourhood renewal to lay ecologies, people are being 'given' all kinds of agency in the making of economy and ecology. Yet relatively little has been said regarding the financial organisation of this new populism, which is often achieved through calculation …
All things weird and scary’: Nanotechnology, theology and cultural resources
Nanotechnology is widely suggested to be fast becoming a defining technology of the twenty-first century. This ‘science of the very small’ has applications in areas from medicine to materials, and is predicted to have profound effects on social life. In this paper, we draw on a study of lay people's reflections on the ethics of nanotechnologies to focus on the talk of one group of participants, from a UK church. While we identify key themes which…
Tools of the Trade: UK Research Intermediaries and the Politics of Impacts
Critical Risk Research: Practices, Politics and Ethics
Materialism and the politics of assemblage
In response to the commentaries on Anderson et al. (2012), the authors’ short response raises questions about, first, the status of materialism and realism in current debates around relations and relationality and, second, the implications of understanding assemblage as a particular kind of ethos for the politics of assemblage-based thinking
On assemblages and geography
In this paper we explore what assemblage thinking offers social-spatial theory by asking what questions or problems assemblage responds to or opens up. Used variously as a concept, ethos and descriptor, assemblage thinking can be placed within the context of the recent 'relational turn' in human geography. In this context, we argue that assemblage thinking offers four things to contemporary social-spatial theory that, when taken together, provide…
Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities
Welcome to the first volume of this new, international, open-access journal.Environmental Humanities aims to support and further a wide range of conversations on environmental issues in this time of growing awareness of the ecological and social challenges facing all life on earth.The field of environmental humanities is growing rapidly, both in research and teaching.In just the past few years, a number of research centres and undergraduate and p…
Why Solar Radiation Management Geoengineering and Democracy Won't Mix
In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging 'social constitution' of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: That the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institu…
Narrative, Nanotechnology and the Accomplishment of Public Responses: A Response to Thorstensen
Taking Roles in Interdisciplinary Collaborations: Reflections on Working in Post-Elsi Spaces in the UK Synthetic Biology Community
Based on criticism of the “ethical, legal and social implications” (ELSI) paradigm, researchers in science and technology studies (STS) have begun to create and move into “post-ELSI” spaces. In this paper, we pool our experiences of working towards collaborative practices with colleagues in engineering and science disciplines in the field of synthetic biology. We identify a number of different roles that we have taken, been assumed to take, or ha…
Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics
Five rules of thumb for post-Elsi interdisciplinary collaborations
In this paper we identify five rules of thumb for interdisciplinary collaboration across the natural and social sciences. We link these to efforts to move away from the ‘ethical, legal and social issues’ framework of interdisciplinarity and towards a post-ELSI collaborative space. It is in trying to open up such a space that we identify the need for: collaborative experimentation, taking risks, collaborative reflexivity, opening-up discussions of…
Earthly graves for environmental futures: Techno-burial practices
In this paper we explore contemporary investments in the underground. We argue that alongside excavation processes the subsurface the underground is increasingly being presented as site for the burial of toxic and radioactive waste and carbon dioxide. We explore two particular burial practices; the long-term disposal of industrial and toxic waste in deep geological repositories and the sequestration of carbon and greenhouse gases in soil. Across …
Rethinking the Final Frontier: Cosmo-Logics and an Ethic of Interstellar Flourishing
In recent years a range of corporate and governmental entities have made increasingly strident moves toward the establishment of an off-Earth mining industry, often touting an imminent “gold rush in space.” For many proponents these proposals are thoroughly entangled with an even more ambitious set of possibilities for a new age of human history in space that will include the exploration and eventual colonization of extraterrestrial environments.…
Political science (35 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Law (21 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Social science (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (12 works)