Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science(14 Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century)

Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve. Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history—one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.

Table of Contents:
Contents Preface: Skin and Code  Abbreviations  Introduction: America and the Tabula Raza  1. Genomic World Building: The Mundus Novus of the Twenty-first Century  2. From Mundus to Model to Mundus Again: The Art of Ancestry between Worlds  3. Making Race: Pharmacogenetics and Its Necessary People  4. For the Love of Blackness: When Science Can Feel Like Home  5. Look, a Black Guy! (With a Genetic Finding)  6. A Family Affair: The Barbed Bonds of Relationship  7. Sci Non-Fi: Cells, Genes, and the Future Tense of “Diversity 8. Seeing Ghosts: From the Excavated Past to the Hauntings of the Present  Conclusion  Acknowledgments  Notes  Bibliography  Index

About the Author :
Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa.

Review :
"Fullwiley's examination is expansive in scope as it maintains the level of detail necessary to draw connections from cells to cultures, from haplotypes to history, and from DNA to disparate impacts observed in history and society. This text is stunning in its range as it assesses both the causes and consequences, past and present, of racialized knowledge construction in the genomic sciences. . . . What Fullwiley has provided for us is certainly a landmark contribution to the social studies of science, medical anthropology, and to the public understanding of the sociopolitical, racialized context of genetic scientific production." "Tabula Raza invites reflection on the multifarious and sometimes troubling uses to which scholarship can be put."