Article ID: CBB001251158

The Democratic, Anti-Racist Genome? Technoscience at the Limits of Liberalism (2012)

unapi

The opening decade of this millennium witnessed genome scientists, policy makers, critical race theorists and world leaders standing together to pronounce the anti-racist democratic potential of human genomics. Understanding and assessing this rise of `anti-racist, democratic genomics' requires distinguishing between two problems of power and science: the first characterized by what Michel Foucault labeled states of domination; the second by what he described as relations of power. When states of domination exist, as in the case of Nazi science, liberal efforts to extend new powers of participation and autonomy to research subjects may play important roles in redressing power imbalances between researchers and their subjects. However, when distinctions between scientist and research subject blur, as in the case of much human genomics, efforts to extend liberal rights to subjects of genomic studies---or genomic liberalism---may produce novel problems, including: (1) human genome scientists' loss of capacity to describe their objects of study; (2) disruption of research subjects' abilities to define themselves; and (3) lack of accountability for the unintended effects of efforts to democratize genomics. In these ways genomic liberalism may foster, at the same that it impedes, the co-constitution of knowledge and democratic subjects. It may create new forms of racism at the very moment that it explicitly seeks anti-racist ends. Addressing the problems created by this paradoxical position will require more sustained attention to and critique of the anti-racist and democratic imaginaries that increasingly animate technoscience.

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Authors & Contributors
Rajagopalan, Ramya
Fujimura, Joan H.
Gil Viry
Mark Wong
Rhodri Ivor Leng
James Lowe
Concepts
Human genetics
Science and race
Genomics
Race
DNA; RNA
Genetics
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
20th century, early
19th century
Places
United States
Puerto Rico
Hawaii (U.S.)
South America
Mexico
Great Britain
Institutions
Human Genome Project
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