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Ordering the Human:

Global Science and Racial Reason

University of Pennsylvania | Perry World House

Thursday, April 12 | 8:30am - 5:15pm

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Understanding and categorizing racial difference have significant implications for individuals across the globe. Historically, these classifications have been the foundational logics upon which violence is justified and perpetrated. Purportedly “universal” and “stable” racial categories continue to affect health outcomes and resource allocation globally as they are incorporated and reinscribed in scientific and biomedical research. By bringing together an international group of biological and social scientists working on these questions in various national and political contexts, the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society (PRSS) aims to uncover how race as a unit of analysis is defined, operationalized, and reconstituted through scientific and biomedical practices. As the legacies of racial divisions continue to influence and circumscribe lives, this symposium will provide a vital starting point to systematically and synthetically analyze the role of racial science and to strategize possible ways out of the naturalization of racial categories.

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Live stream link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZbKZSTYc7_N8dk5aEs19WA/live

8:30 – 9:00 Breakfast

9:00 – 9:15 Welcome and Introductions

Provost Wendell Pritchett (Penn)

Dorothy Roberts (Penn)

9:15 – 10:45 Panel 1 | Individuals and Composites

Amade M'charek (University of Amsterdam - Netherlands)

Technologies of Sameness, Technologies of Race

Carolyn Roberts (Yale)

Violent and Violating Medicine in the British Slave Trade

Shirley Sun (Nanyang Technical University - Singapore)

Genome Based Toxicity Studies - Ongoing Tensions in Clinical Medicine

Commentator: Pamela Sankar (Penn)

10:45 – 11:00 Break

11:00 – 12:30 Panel 2 | Purity and Mixture

Projit Bihari Mukharji (Penn)

Musalmani: Genes, Souls, and Congenital Circumcision

Ricardo Santos Ventura (FIOCRUZ - Brazil)

João Luis Bastos (UFSC - Brazil)

“In the eye of the beholder”: Race and Classification in Contemporary Brazil

Vivette García Deister (UNAM - Mexico)

Mixed People's Science: Genomic Narratives of Disease in Mexico

Commentator: Sebastián Gil-Riaño (Penn)

12:30 – 1:30 Lunch

1:30 – 3:00 Panel 3 | Stability and Circulation

Julie Ringelheim (UCLouvain - Belgium)

Adjudicating Race: Judges, Human Rights and the Racial Conundrum

Ambroise Wonkam (University of Cape Town – South Africa)

Bantu is Not Equal to Bantu: The Case of Malaria Resistant Genes in Africa

Pablo Gómez (UW-Madison)

Double Labor: Race, Quantification, and the Invention of Modern Bodies

Commentator: Michael Hanchard (Penn)

3:00 – 3:30 Coffee Break

3:30 – 5:00 Panel 4 | Past and Promise

Kristin Peterson (UC-Irvine)

Ethical Misrecognition: A Politics of Pharmaceutical and Racial Capitalism

David Jones (Harvard)

Alyssa Botelho (Harvard)

South Asian Heart Disease: Genetics, History, and Contested Narratives of Susceptibility

Isaac Warbrick (Auckland Technical University – New Zealand)

Racism and Weight-ism in the Māori Community

Commentator: Evelynn Hammonds (Harvard)

5:00 – 5:15 Closing