New Technologies - old Categories? The Problematization of Race at the Interface between Science and Politics

With the rise of new genomic technologies and an ongoing proliferation of human diversity research there has been a growing academic concern about the revival of biological understandings of race in the life sciences. Clearly it is no more enough to say that race is a social construction, if that mantra relies on a separation between race as a biological fiction vs. racism as a social reality. Race has never been confined to the realm of biology it always constituted a complex and malleable configuration of cultural, material and political elements. To simply dismiss its biological existence therefore misses the point. In order to account for the stubborn persistence and troubling presence of race in contemporary times, I suggest a topological approach to ethnographically examine how race is coproduced between science and politics.