dests

LOST Seminar
Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung
Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle/Saale
July 7 2010
Im kolloquium der LOST gruppe am MPI in Halle wird Amade M’charek aus Amsterdam am 7.7. um 18.00 ihr Paper „The HeLa Error: On the aeLsthetics of wholeness and the materiality of race“ vorstellen und diskutieren. Interessierte sind herzlich willkommen!
Abstract:
The paper is about the politics and routines of race in genetics. The context of this paper is the omnipresence of research on genetic diversity and the reintroduction of racial categories in the field. The object of this paper is a mundane laboratory technology, a DNA reference sequence. The concern of this paper is the persistent notion that normativity and politics are exclusively articulated by human actors. I here wish to present a case in which these are articulated in technology. Race is therefore part of routines and practices where nothing strange seems to be going on. Race is therefore - by consequence - not merely a matter of deliberation. Race, I will argue, is an absent-present (these are the words of John Law 2002) as an effect of technologies and practices that cannot be left behind.
The DNA reference sequence seems tiny (invisible for the bare eye) and trivial (part of every day routine), yet its history is too big to present in one paper. I will therefore present three short but related stories. Stories that somehow account for this history. I have chosen an art metaphor to present them, namely a triptych.
As we move along the panels of the triptych a story about the absent-presence of race in science will enfold.  I will argue that the desire of geneticists to produce a reference sequence that represents nature as it is, contributes to the naturalization of the sequence and to the back-grounding of race. However, given that the sequence is made somewhere and in a specific time, a minor flaw - present in the end-result - functions as political noise, reminding us of its complex racial history.

Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, 2-3 July 2010

Abstract
Forensic uses of DNA technologies have become crucial elements of
national systems of criminal justice. In addition, as a result of
growing transnational mobility and the global use of information and
communication technologies crime and crime prevention issues are
increasingly addressed by agencies and policy actors beyond the national
state. In the European context, the so-called Prüm regime obliges law
enforcement authorities in all EU countries to render their forensic DNA
databases searchable for other member states by 2011 (at a match/no
match basis). This also means that countries which do not yet have
centralized forensic DNA databases need to establish them by that date.
In sum, the importance of forensic DNA databasing will continue to
increase in the political and public arenas across Europe.

While the legal and criminological implications of forensic and police
uses of DNA analysis and databasing have received ample attention in the
last decade, their societal dimensions have not been systematically
explored. Social science projects in this field are relatively scarce,
and there is virtually no comparative social science research on this
topic across countries. Our workshop aims to fill this gap: Social
scientists who pioneer(ed) work in this field will present their
research projects and engage in a dialogue with an eminent molecular
biologist in Portugal, António Amorim. A concluding round table
discussion will be dedicated to explicating current challenges faced by
social science research in the field of forensic DNA profiling and
datatabasing.

Read the rest of this entry »