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Goldsmiths Department of Sociology Annual Lecture
Thursday, 24th October, 4pm-6pm
Professor Stuart Hall
Building LG 02
Goldsmiths, University
of London
Amade
M’charek (Professor of Anthropology of Science, University
of Amsterdam)
Race, Face and Forensic Identification
The face is evident and intricate. In everyday life the face is ubiquitous. Yet in social theory the face is rather absent. In my lecture I want to move beyond the representational model and attend to the work that a face can do, and to what the face is capable of. I introduce the concept of the tentacular to analyze how the face draws certain publics together and how it feeds on that public to assume content and contours. My examples come for the field of forensic genetics, where DNA-phenotyping is used to produce a ‘composite face’ of the unknown individual. I will show that this novel technology is not so much aimed at the individual suspect but at a suspect population, clusters of individuals. I argue that this population is racialized through the biologization of the phenotype.
This process prompts the question: what is race? To answer this, I suggest that we need to ‘care’ for race, i.e., to invent methods that are open-ended and allow us to follow race around and examine how it shifts and changes in practice. I propose the concept of generous methods to show that the slipperiness of race is not simply a matter of ‘multiplicity’; race is not only an ‘object multiple’. As a word and a practice, race is different ontological things altogether. Different realities: race is an object, a tool, and a theory. Three different yet connected realities, contributing to its slipperiness as well as its virulent nature.
-- ---------------------------------- Michael Guggenheim 17 Popham Street N1 8QW London UK
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