<html>
<body>
<div align="center"><font size=4><b>STS Colloquium – Monday March 13 –
4:00 p.m. - MIT, E51-095<br>
</b></font></div>
<br>
<div align="center"><font size=5 color="#0000FF"><b>Genealogical
Branches, Genetic Roots, <br>
and the Pursuit of African Ancestry<br>
</b></font></div>
<br>
<div align="center"><font size=5><b>Alondra Nelson, Yale University<br>
</b></font></div>
<br>
Recent advances in genetic science have begun to transform not only
biomedical research practices but our conceptions of human relatedness as
well. One development contributing to this rearrangement of the social
world is the advent of genetic heredity tracing--commercial testing to
assign or confirm racial/ethnic ancestry. These services hold particular
appeal for African Americans who desire to bridge the historical and
psychological lacuna that resulted from the dispersal of Africans during
the slave trade. Genetic heredity tracing, somewhat like the genealogical
research used by Alex Haley in the 1970s, is a technique by which persons
of African descent can move beyond the more proximal branches of the
family tree to temporally and spatially distal African roots. Based on
ethnographic fieldwork among African American genealogists who are also
consumers of genetic heredity tracing services, this talk explores the
ways in which notions of racial identity, history, and kinship are
produced and contested when conventional genealogical methods are
employed alongside novel genetic techniques. The discussion will also
raise broader matters, including the public understanding of genetic
science and recent scholarly debates over the epistemological status of
“race.”<br>
<br>
Alondra Nelson is Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American
Studies at Yale University. Her research interests are in three principle
areas 1) the socio-cultural implications of genetic science, particularly
how “naturalist” and “pragmatist” understandings of “race” are negotiated
by individuals, social groups, and scholarly communities; (2) African
American health social movements and health activism; and (3) racial
formation processes in science, biomedicine, and technoculture. Nelson is
the co-editor (with Thuy Linh N. Tu) of Technicolor: Race, Technology,
and Everyday Life (NYU Press 2001). She is presently at work on Body and
Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Race and Health, a
forthcoming book about<br>
late-twentieth century African American advocacy around issues of genetic
disease, medicalized models of social unrest, and reproductive rights.
Her talk on Monday will be drawn from an ethnographic study in progress
that explores the transformation of African American and Black British
social identities attendant to the use of commercial genetic technologies
to trace ancestry.<br>
<br>
Please join us on Monday at 4:00 p.m.!<br><br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390<br>
</body>
</html>