The Politics of Difference, Time and Again. On the Ir/Relevance of Race in post-Soviet Human Genetics.

Ir/Relevance of Race seminar with Susanne Bauer

Lecture

A seminar by Susanne Bauer, junior professor in sociology of science at Goethe University Frankfurt/ Main. Her main focus in teaching and research is in STS and her work particularly deals with the life sciences, genomics, epidemiology and environmental health in Scandinavia, Germany and post-Soviet countries.

Abstract

This paper asks for the ir/relevance of race in post-Soviet life sciences. It explores the strange temporalities enacted in databasing and visualization practices in human population genetics.
Taking up the statements by geneticists themselves that the past is always contained in the present, I ask how contemporary assemblages contain, make and enact specific temporalities and understandings of population. As genetic data are made and mapped on a geographic grid, scientists model the empirical data from few scattered data points.
This paper carves out what is folded into these computer-aided visualization techniques that generate cybernetic versions of populations as systemic entities, as exposed to certain temporal forces. Instead of discussing their representational character, I follow genetic visualizations to explore what folds into them and describe the layering and realigning of contexts within them, especially in view of the shifts in the practices and meanings of genetics.
Modelling procedures enact specific mathematical-systemic versions of population, evolution, and difference.
While popular versions amalgamate Russian imperial anthropology and early Soviet traditions, later sciences are grounded in post-Lysenko Soviet genetics as much as in the international circulation of methods, reagents and concepts during the Cold War.

 

About the lecturer

Susanne Bauer is junior professor in sociology of science at Goethe University Frankfurt/ Main.
Her main focus in teaching and research is in STS and her work particularly deals with the life sciences, genomics, epidemiology and environmental health in Scandinavia, Germany and post-Soviet countries.
She was senior fellow at IFK Vienna, visiting professor at Indiana University Bloomington and research scholar at the MPIWG and at Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin.
Selected publications:

• Virtual Geographies of Belonging. The Case of Soviet and Post-Soviet Human Genetic Diversity Research. Science, Technology & Human Values 39(4), 2014: 511-537; 
• From Administrative Infrastructure to Biomedical Resource: Population Registries, the Danish Laboratory, and the Epidemiologist’s Dream. Science in Context 27(2), 2014: 187-213; 
• Modeling Population Health. Reflections on the Performativity of Epidemiological Techniques in the Age of Genomics. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27(4), 2013: 510-530. 

About the seminar series

In this seminar series the relevance and irrelevance of race is being discussed as an object and concept of research in order to explore ways to talk about race without naturalizing differences. The series goes beyond a standard definition of race, one that is allegedly relevant everywhere, and situates race in specific practices of research. In addition the series gives room to the various different versions of race that can be found in the European context and explores when and how populations, religions, and cultures become naturalized and racialized. Scholars from different (inter)disciplinary fields (such as genetics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, history, political sciences, science and technology studies) are invited to address the issue of race through a paper presentation. The seminar is held every six weeks at the University of Amsterdam. Webpage Seminar Series

Published by  AISSR