[Sci-tech-public] March 13th STS Colloquium: Alondra Nelson, Yale

[Debbie Meinbresse]

STS Colloquium – Monday March 13 – 4:00 p.m. - MIT, E51-095

Genealogical Branches, Genetic Roots,
and the Pursuit of African Ancestry

Alondra Nelson, Yale University

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.”

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
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.

Please join us on Monday at 4:00 p.m.!


Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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