[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, September 26 - Lindsay Smith - (Please RSVP)

[STS]

 *STS Circle at Harvard*
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*
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*Lindsay Smith
*
*UCLA*
*
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on

*“Genetics is a study in faith”: the Disappeared of Latin America, science
as development, and the fragility of identification*
*
*
Monday, September 26th
12:15-2:00 p.m.
124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts
<sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<sts at hks.harvard.edu>by 5pm
Thursday, September 22nd.
*
*
*Abstract:* In the last half of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands
of Latin Americans were forcibly disappeared as dictatorial leaders waged
brutal counter-insurgency wars to stamp out communism on the continent. In
the aftermath, scientists became key human rights activists as they remade
forensic anthropology and human genetics to document genocide and return the
dead and missing to searching families. Based in racial typing, forensics,
and genetics these new methods both reinforced and remade human
identification by linking biological and technological determinism,
surveillance, and spaces of indigenous revival and collective mourning and
remembrance. In this paper, I analyze an example of the contradictory and
contested politics of human identification: the Latin American Initiative to
Identify the Disappeared, a US funded DNA analysis project. Drawing on
fieldwork in Guatemala and Argentina, I explore the implications of an
international paradigm grounded in DNA databanking as human rights work,
development, and security. I suggest that the material and political
fragility of identification both supercedes and undermines these goals,
creating new configurations of biopower and unexpected spaces of
biofallibility.


*Biography*:  Lindsay Smith is a medical anthropologist and postdoctoral
fellow at the Center for Society and Genetics at University of California,
Los Angeles. She received her PhD from Harvard University in Social
Anthropology in 2008 and was previously a fellow in Science and Human
Culture at Northwestern University. Her book manuscript, *Subversive Genes:
Making human rights and DNA in Argentina *focuses on the development of
forensic genetics as a tool for transitional justice and democracy building.
She recently published “Emotional Engagements: Acknowledgement, Advocacy and
Direct Action” co-authored with Arthur Kleinman in the edited
collection *Emotions
in the Field*. As an ethnographic filmmaker, she has made films in
collaboration with Argentine human rights groups. Her documentary, *Aparcion
con Vida*/ Bring them Back Alive examines the use of DNA in the search for
children kidnapped during the Argentine “Dirty War”. She is currently
studying the Latin American Initiative to Identify the Disappeared (LIID), a
multinational scientific collaboration to use large-scale DNA databanking to
identify the Disappeared of Argentina, Guatemala, and Peru.

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http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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