Emma Kowal in conversation

The Readings Podcast

In this episode, a conversation with Emma Kowal, anthropologist and physician and author of the book Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia. The book recounts the troubled history of Western biological studies and Indigenous Australians. The stories Kowal tells feature a variety of ghostly presences: a dead anatomist, a fetishised piece of hair hidden away in a war trunk, and an elusive white Indigenous person. By linking this history to the contemporary moment, Kowal outlines the fraught complexities, perils and potentials of studying Indigenous biological difference in the twenty-first century.