Duana Fullwiley - 'Skin and Code: Genomic World Building in the 21st Century'

This will be an in person event

Speaker: Duana Fullwiley (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University)
Chair: Sahra Gibbon, Anthropology, UCL
Discussants: Lara Choksey, SPRC, UCL; Paige Patchin, SPRC, UCL

Increasingly race, ancestry, and genetic articulations of group identities have been intimately enlisted in scientific thinking about health, disease, and susceptibilities of all kinds. In this talk, I explore the ways that actors in the field of medical genetics have re-created visions of the world in their models to assess genetic ancestry. With the hope to better understand risks of illness, key researchers both borrow from and re-instantiate American notions of racial difference, often in unsuspecting ways. I offer the concept of science nonfiction as “sci non-fi,” with its necessary corollary to science fiction, to detail how real-world references of skin, binary code, genetic material, and political tools of race-based civil rights inclusion all merge in a new vision of the world. It is one painted in racialized colors, and populated with chimeric mashups of possibility and stasis that, in many instances, collapse past and future to deal with the tensions of the present.

Duana Fullwiley is a literary anthropologist of science and medicine whose fieldwork with scientists, patients, and larger publics explores the interplay of genetics, health and cultural politics in Senegal, France, and the United States. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa as well as numerous articles on race and ancestry genetics in the United States. Her newest book Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science is forthcoming with the University of California press (April 2024). Fullwiley has received awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholars Program to Senegal, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the National Science Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program at Harvard University, the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She currently teaches at Stanford University in the Department of Anthropology, with affiliations in the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity as well as the Science, Technology and Society Program

This event is a jointly hosted event between SHS Health, Mind and Society and the Sarah Parker Remond Centre