Paper short abstract:

Capturing racism in a context in which the biological non-existence of race and its unimportance for the medical practices are affirmed, requires we think ways to “staying with the trouble”. Taking race as biosocial I´ll reflect on methods that can explore racism on its long-term effects.

Paper long abstract:

I will seek to present in this panel the way in which race and racism materialize in everyday practices in the health field. These reflections are the result of my doctoral research, in which I dealt with the challenge of capturing race and the effects of racism, in a context in which, repeatedly, the biological non-existence of race and its unimportance for the medical field were affirmed. However, race has always been an absent presence, which escaped discourses, decisions, technologies and health interventions. Starting from the contributions of STS Studies to capture the ontological multiplicity that race gains in these spaces and, reflecting on the reality effects that racism promotes, I will seek to contribute to the reflection on innovative methodological proposals to capture race in biosocial terms, this by exploring the way in which race is inscribed into the body. To this end, I will explore some insights from the ethnographic work I have been carrying out with a birth cohort in Southern Brazil, within the scope of the Pot Doc project "Biosocial Lives of Birth cohorts" (UCL), trying to reflect on how such cohort studies have the potential to explore the effects of racism on its long-term approach.