Associate Professor Helen Verran
Contact
Rm 204, Old Quad
The University of Melbourne
VIC 3010 Australia
T: (03) 8344 0229
E: hrv@unimelb.edu.au
Academic profile
Helen Verran has taught in HPS at University of Melbourne since 1990. Before that she worked briefly in science studies and education at Deakin University after spending most of the 1980s working at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. In 2003 her book Science and an African Logic in which she examines her experiences of working across knowledge traditions in Nigeria, won the Ludwik Fleck Prize.
Since returning to Australia Helen has been involved with several Yolngu Aboriginal groups and individuals as they negotiate valid ways for Yolngu knowledge traditions to work with the sciences. An early publication from this work is Singing the Land Signing the Land. Recently Helen has worked in close collaboration with Michael Christie of Charles Darwin University on the Indigenous Knowledge and Resource Management in Northern Australia project and the Indigenous Consultants Initiative. She is currently collecting the many papers she has written as part of this work into a book with the working title ‘Science and the Dreaming. Doing Practical Empirical Philosophy’.
Helen has a developing research interest in sustainability and its working knowledges. This interest has grown out of her teaching philosophy of biology and ecology and environmentalism. In this research she works closely with Marianne Lien of the Institute of Anthropology at University of Oslo. Together Helen and Marianne have established the Performing Natures at Worlds Ends Workshop.
Helen supervises a group of active research students across a diverse range of topics; at a methodological level they share an interest in practical empirical philosophy.
Teaching
- First year: Science, Philosophy, and History
- Third year: Philosophy of Biology
- Fourth and Fifth year: Ecology and Environmentalism