March 18, 2024

Introducing a new project team member!

Guest post by Rebecca Paxton!

Hello everyone and thank you to Cate for inviting me to introduce myself as the newest member of the KINnect team. I will be working on what Cate once described as the “most nerve-wracking” part of the project, namely understanding the disciplinary overlaps and separations that have shaped aDNA research. I hope that you’ll hear more from me on this topic as the research progresses.

My name is Rebecca Paxton and I usually describe myself as a miscellaneous social scientist, or an academic magpie, with a passion for inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. I started out studying geography and international relations (I’m fascinated by boundaries) with a particular interest in the impacts of natural disasters on sustainable development and community resilience. I’ve since worked in food and farming systems research, and most recently on topics related to the development and applications of genetic technologies in agriculture, human health, and conservation.

What does this have to do with kin and connection? To me, connection has been a throughline of my work. If you squint, I’m still essentially a geographer at heart, faithfully applying Waldo Tobler’s first law of geography: Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.¹ Thankfully, in social science we get to question and discuss terms like ‘related’, ‘near’, and ‘distant’ (and ‘things’, but that’s a conversation for another time). By exploring how people experience and make sense of connections and connectedness, we can begin to understand how they pursue knowledge and use that knowledge to purposefully interact with their environments. These questions are as relevant to scientists as they are to farmers, disaster managers, or the prehistoric peoples whose tools Cate studies.

In the KINnect project, Cate and I hope to better understand how our colleagues in aDNA make sense of their field as a shared and diverse undertaking. Along the way, we will explore how aDNA research is evolving, for example through collaboration with, or critique of, related disciplines. We will also look to the future by asking how to foster greater collaboration and connection between researchers, institutions, and disciplines studying human history. Our aim is to open up, rather than close down, conversations about how human histories are (and ought to be) told through the diversity of available datasets, methods, and professional practices.

This part of the KINnect project is only just getting started and there’s still a lot of planning and preparation that needs to take place before we launch into these conversations. We are hoping to begin reaching out to people in the aDNA field in the second half of the year once we get approval from the ANU’s human research ethics committee. Stay tuned for more posts about this research and potential invitations to participate!