Haunting Biology
Book Forum
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3624419 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Trevor Engel (0009-0002-8308-9655, corresponding author), Beth Greenhough (0000-0002-7351-2619), Frédéric Keck (0000-0002-7711-7288), Ros Williams (0000-0002-4295-2582), Meredith Evans (0000-0002-9986-3185, University of Toronto), Benjamin Hegerty, E Kowal (0000-0003-3866-3224) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 1-23 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Medicine Anthropology Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2405-691X • E-ISSN: 2405-691X |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.17157/mat.12.3.10020 |
| OpenAlex | W4411378438 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
Emma Kowal's Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity (2023) investigates the history of biological and medical research about Indigenous peoples in Australia. This book forum invited contributors to provide nuanced insights that engage the book's central contributions to debates in medical anthropology about decoloniality and racial science. Bringing together medical historians, anthropologists, and scholars of science and technology Trevor Engel, Beth Greenhough, Frederic Keck, and Ros Williams, the forum's contributors highlight the profound utility of Kowal's insights and the necessity of attending to the spectral presence of the colonial-era ghosts that haunt the ground on which contemporary biological science, including genetics and epigenetics, is practised. The forum contributors draw out the multivalent affects that ghosts provoke, brought to presence through Kowal's ethnographic observations and rich archival research. They engage ghostly characters like British scientist Baldwin Spencer, who sits out of sight but not out of mind in a museum storeroom, and surgeon and Australian anatomist Sir William Colin Mackenzie, who haunts the dreams of Goenpul Indigenous filmmaker Romaine Moreton. Each contributor shows the productive tension gained by following Kowal's directive to listen to these and other ghosts around us, and gesture towards the possibilities of decolonial scientific practices
Biology · Library science · Computer Science · Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |