About the Book
Investigating the reality and significance of racial categories, Remapping Race in a Global Context examines the role of race in human genomics, biomedicine, and struggles for social justice around the world.
In this book, biologists, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers inspect critical questions around the biological reality of race and how it has been understood in different national and regional contexts. The essays also examine debates on the usefulness of race in medical and epidemiological studies. With a focus on the fields of human genomics and biomedicine, this book presents critical findings on whether and how race might be ethically and epistemologically justified in our age of personalized medicine, mass surveillance, and biased algorithms.
The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in a broad range of scientific and humanistic disciplines, including biology, anthropology, geography, philosophy, cultural or community studies, critical race theory, and any field concerned with the deep racial dividing lines running across societies globally.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Remapping Race in a Global Context
Part I: Lewontin (1972), 50 Years Later
1. Lewontin (1972)
2. Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin’s Fallacy, 20 Years Later
3. Human Genetic Diversity: Fact and Fallacy
4. Racial Classification Without Race: Edwards’ Fallacy
Part II: Indigeneity, the Americas, and Colonialism
5. Genomics, Bio-prospecting, Indigeneity
6. Latino STEM Teachers, DACA, and the Future of Teaching
7. Decolonizing the Curriculum in the American Southwest: The Role of Education in the Maintenance of the Colonial Hierarchy
8. Inclusion Without Equity: The Need to Empower Indigenous Genomic Data Sovereignty in Precision Health
Part III: On the Biological Non-Reality of Race
9. Modern Population Genetics and Race
10. The Biological Reality of Race: What is at Stake?
11. New Work for a Critical Metaphysics of Race
Part IV: On the Biological Reality of Race
12. A Metaphysical Mapping Problem for Race Theorists and Human Population Geneticists
13. Five Advantages of the Phylogenetic Race Concept
Part V: Race and Medicine
14. The Biopolitics of Race Revisited
15. Social "Races" in Biomedical Settings
16. Race as Witchcraft. An Argument Against Indiscriminate Eliminativism about Race
Postscript: Race: The Story Without End
About the Author :
Ludovica Lorusso is a Research Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She is the author of peer-reviewed papers in philosophy of biology, philosophy of race, and philosophy of perception, where she proposed a new model of perception of faces. Her current research interests include philosophy of biomedicine, science, technology, and society (STS); and bioethics.
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther is Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He works in the philosophy of science and philosophy of biology and has interests in epistemology and political philosophy, cartography and GIS, and science in general. Recent publications include "A Beginner's Guide to the New Population Genomics of Homo sapiens: Origins, Race, and Medicine" in The Harvard Review of Philosophy; "Mapping the Deep Blue Oceans" in The Philosophy of GIS; When Maps Become the World (2020); and Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics (2022).
Review :
"Lorusso and Winther’s volume offers a timely intervention in discussions of biological aspects of racial identity. Including well-written essays by scholars at the forefront of biological, social, and medical debates about the nature, role, and value of racial classification, it is a compact introduction to central arguments about the nature of racial diversity."
Helen Longino, Stanford University, USA
"The editors gathered an impressive interdisciplinary team of experts, biologists (Nielsen, Edwards), philosophers of science or metaphysicians (Hochmann, Brandon, Spencer, etc), of social scientists or medical ethicists, whose collaboration in this book achieves a real cartography of the question of race, and advances its understanding. Pluralist, well informed, rigorous, innovative in all of its contributions, this book is a must read for any philosopher, social scientist, physician or biologist concerned with the question of race today, the legitimacy of any race talk, and the role it can play at the intersection of ethics, medicine, politics, science and metaphysics."
Philippe Huneman, Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS), France
"Overall, this is a very interesting collection that clearly shows when it comes to questions about race the answers are not clear-cut, or of the black-or-white kind." - Kostas Kampourakis, Biology, University of Geneva
