Unsettling epigenetics: contested understandings of trauma and evidence in settler colonial Australia

Abstract

This thesis examines how the search for biological evidence of intergenerational trauma through environmental epigenetics has become a highly contested space within Indigenous health research in settler colonial Australia. Intergenerational trauma is a popular model for understanding how colonial and racist policies have had, and continue to have, long-lasting and multi-generational impacts on the health and wellbeing of Indigenous peoples. Environmental epigenetics is a field of post-genomic science in which genetic expression is understood to be plastic and changeable due to exposures to environmental factors such as nutrition, stress, and trauma, and it has been linked to intergenerational trauma within Indigenous health spaces. The possibility of epigenetic inheritance of trauma across generations has captured the imagination of many researchers, scientists, and health workers. Conducting qualitative research during COVID-19, including interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous health workers, researchers, lab scientists and social workers, archival research, ethnographic fieldwork at scientific conferences both in-person and online, and fieldwork on remote Indigenous lands in South Australia, the thesis explores how evidence of trauma through epigenetics is produced, enacted, and performed in different evidentiary spaces. Drawing on key theoretical contributions from Science & Technology Studies and medical anthropology, the thesis demonstrates that the allure of epigenetics lies in its capacity to validate existing Indigenous knowledges on intergenerational trauma within a molecular frame. However, this same aspect is also what concerns many participants, as it positions molecular evidence of intergenerational harm as more legitimate than other forms of knowledge and evidence. Additionally, epigenetic models of trauma risk perpetuating a deficit-based model of Indigenous health by continually ascribing ‘damage’ to Indigenous bodies at a molecular level. The thesis links these tensions surrounding intergenerational trauma and the role of science in producing evidence of harm to the tensions present in the 1984-85 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, a Royal Commission that sought to bring to light the ongoing, intergenerational impacts of the British nuclear testing program that occurred in South Australia in the 1950s-60s. By placing contemporary environmental epigenomics into conversation with historical radiation exposure from nuclear testing, the thesis demonstrates how concepts such as porosity, inheritance, trauma, and the privileging of the biological have long been intertwined in matters of evidence production and hierarchies of knowledge when it comes to Indigenous health in the settler colonial state of Australia. By drawing attention to these overlapping fields, this thesis seeks to critique and unsettle how biological ‘evidence’ of intergenerational trauma is imagined, produced, circulated, and contested within Indigenous health contexts in Australia.