Teaching and Learning Guide for

Author’s introduction Over the last 20 years, there has been a technological advance and commercial boom in genetic technologies and projects. These developments include a renewed scientific interest in the biological status and genetic constitution of race. This aspect of genetic research is of interest to sociologists and others working in the field of race and ethnicity studies. While the consensus among sociologists is that race is a social construction with no biological foundations, innovations in genetic research have pushed sociologists and other social scientists to reflect upon the ways in which ideas of biology mediate everyday understandings of race. Anthropologists, cultural geographers and sociologists have begun to study the complex and ambivalent ways in which laypeople think about the biological and genetic constitution of racial identities. Central to this area of inquiry has been analysis of laypeople’s engagements with the new reproductive technologies, such as IVF. In addition, social scientists have begun to study laypeople’s uses of genealogical technologies that claim to trace family ancestries, including racial descent and ethnic origins. Ultimately, such studies enable a deeper understanding of the social construction of ‘race’, and in the course of so doing provide an important research avenue to challenge racism. Author recommends Wade, Peter 2002. Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective . London: Pluto Press. In this book, Peter Wade argues that anthropological studies of kinship provide a lens to think about how ideas of nature and culture mediate the formation of racial identities. Drawing upon studies from within anthropology, Wade contends that an increasing emphasis upon the ‘gene’ at the everyday level does not necessarily signify a growing genetic/biological determinism in laypeople’s conceptions of race and human nature. Rather, he suggests anthropological studies that explore the biological and social ‘origins’ of persons can be deployed to unpack ‘everyday’ understandings of the relationship between ideas of ‘race’, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. In his review of anthropological approaches to the study of ‘race’, Wade (2002, 15) writes that, ‘People...move between the biological and the social, the given and the developing, the permanent and the changeable, in ways that blur the boundary between them’. Skinner, D. 2006. ‘Racialized Futures: Biologism and the Changing Politics of Identity.’ Social Studies of Science 36 : 459–88. In this paper, David Skinner examines sociologists’ and scientists’ reflections on the social and ethical implications of recent research on race and genetics. He argues research on race and genetics has led to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future: ‘one in which scientific racism is revived, the other in which science finally abolishes race thinking’. Skinner contends that detailed critical attention needs to be paid to existing notions of relatedness, personhood and nature/culture, to understand the implication of genetic science on racial thinking. Franklin, S. and S. Mckinnon (eds) 2001. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This book provides a collection of articles that represent the diversity of perspectives that constitute the ‘new kinship studies’ within anthropology. Chapters by Kath Weston, Charis Thompson and Signe Howell focus explicitly upon how ideas of biology, blood and culture mediate the formation of racial identities within everyday and popular discourses. In this vein, Thompson explores how kinship ideologies become reconfigured by people who take‐up the opportunities offered by the new reproductive technologies, for example, ova and sperm donation. In so doing, Thompson’s study illuminates the ways in which these recent clinical practices have opened a space for anthropologists to examine how ideas about biogenetic and social relatedness within families and across generations become intersected with ideas about the inheritance of ethnic and racial identities. Wade, Peter (ed.) 2007. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics . Oxford: Berghahn, New York. This book brings together a collection of essays written by scholars who worked collaboratively for 3 years exploring everyday articulations of race, ethnicity and genetics across Europe in the face of innovations in genetic science. The book draws upon a rich array of anthropological studies of ‘assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed‐race families, Basque identity politics and post‐Soviet nation‐building’ to explore how ideas of race, ethnicity, nation and nature are lived and experienced by people within differing European social contexts. Tyler, Katharine, 2009. ‘Whiteness Studies and Laypeople's Engagements with Race and Genetics.’ New Genetics and Society 28 (1): 36–48. In this paper, Tyler proposes a research strategy for examining laypeople’s thoughts and reflections on innovations in the science of race and genetics. While some sociologists have shown a reluctance to engage in such discussions, Tyler argues that social scientists need to take such views seriously. To do this, the paper brings together an anthropological approach to the study of scientific literacy and recent scholarship in the field of Whiteness studies. The combining of these literatures raises a set of interesting and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the ways in which social scientists and research participants contribute to the reproduction of White power and dominance in Western societies. Online materials ‘Ten commandments’ of race and genetics issued, Science in Society http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14345‐ten‐commandments‐of‐race‐and‐genetics‐issued.html This website describes 10 ‘guiding principles’ for the scientific community in relation to research on race and genetics. These principles were written by a multidisciplinary group including geneticists, psychologists, historians and philosophers. At the end of the principles are reflections from readers of the New Scientist . Motherland: A Genetic Journey , BBC Documentary, Director Archie Baron; Producer Tabitha Jackson http://www.rootsforreal.com/motherland_en.php The programme analysed the DNA of 228 Black African Caribbean descent men and women living in the United Kingdom. The research participants were selected on the criteria that they had two generations of paternal and maternal grandparents that were of Black African Caribbean descent. Twenty‐six percent of the Black male participants were told that their Y chromosome, inherited through the male line, traced them back to a European ancestor. The tests also showed that mitochondria DNA that is inherited through the maternal line affiliated many of the research participants with ancestors from African tribal groups. The documentary follows the journeys of three research participants who used their newly acquired genetic kinship to interrogate either their Black/African or their White/European ancestry, depending on which aspect of their identity was important to them. In this regard, the viewer is left with the impression that an individual’s DNA can be objectively coded, separated and divided into its racially distinct component parts. However, when the research participants embarked on their journeys to forgotten African and Caribbean ancestral home‐places, they unexpectedly discovered the entanglement of White and Black people’s colonial histories and origins. In this way, knowledge of genetic ancestry when combined with social relationships and history can be put to work to undermine the idea of racially pure li

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