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Short abstract:

This presentation will discuss how race, disability, and other social identifiers are co-constituted with pathologies by exploring racial disparities in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) diagnoses.

Long abstract:

Recent studies have shown that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), two disorders commonly diagnosed in childhood, are disparately diagnosed by race. One study has found that Black and Latino children are significantly less likely to receive an ADHD diagnosis compared to their White peers (Morgan et al. 2013), and another that Black and Latino children are more likely to receive an ODD diagnosis than an ADHD one (Fadus 2019). While both diagnoses have social and legal implications, an ODD one has greater consequences including increased barriers to disability accommodation in schools (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act 2004) and higher assessments of criminality in the juvenile justice system (Rockett et al. 2007).

What is considered clinically normal and abnormal is constantly being revised. For disorders like ADHD and ODD, which merely describe a set of behaviors, these revisions are even more frequent. How do race, disability, and other social identifiers influence the creation, distribution, and reinforcement of diagnoses? Past scholarship has looked at the medicalization of nonnormative behavior as a form of social control wherein deviant or unproductive behavior is reconfigured as a sickness that can thus be corrected. I believe that comparing the rates of diagnosis and perceptions of ADHD and ODD, informed by past scholarship on race, disability, and gender in the education and carceral system, could elucidate new connections between how pathologies and social identities are co-constituted. In this presentation I will discuss my preliminary outline for addressing these questions.

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Short abstract:

“Racializing Redwoods” considers Coast Redwoods and Giant Sequoias as transnational objects of racial science. Using examples from both the US and Germany, my presentation traces the creation of two regional parks that curated and interpreted the species as a symbol of white supremacy.

Long abstract:

“Racializing Redwoods” considers the creation of Coast Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) and Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron gigantea) as transnational objects of racial science. Using examples from both the US and Germany during 1920 to 1945, my presentation traces the creation of two regional parks that curated and interpreted the species as a symbol of white supremacy. Leaders of both the US Save the Redwoods League and German National Socialists connected the species’ charisma to their political aims, citing that the nobility of and the threats to both species were the same to those of white people, whose nobility was threatened by nonwhite immigration. These aims were made clear in pamphlets and propaganda published by both groups and given to visiting publics of both parks, with the US using the trees to introduce the broader public to nativist thought, while in Germany, the trees were used to educate visitors on “Blood and Soil” and Lebensraum. Misrepresenting the species in these ways made spatial and racial differences seem “natural,” when in fact they were artificially created to serve political agendas of those in power. To save the trees, as my case studies show, was to also save the white race. In this presentation, I explore the use of Coast Redwoods and Giant Sequoias as tools of white supremacy and nationalism in the US and Germany — a legacy that has continued, creating environmental injustice, climate change inaction, and various communities failing to commune amongst each other and nature.

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Short abstract:

In this paper, I argue that to understand the extractive systems of trade routes, plantation management of plants, animals and peoples, the choice and regimes of agricultural crops through plant breeding and transgenesis betrays the racial logics of colonial biology.

Long abstract:

While ‘race’ is usually theorized within the sphere of the human and within Euro-American colonial imaginaries, race is in fact a foundational category in biology. In Linnaean biological classification, race spans human and non-human worlds. The Linnaean imagination categorized all living things into a colonial imagination where all species and races’ had their place in the natural order.

This paper explores how ‘race’ and racial logics traverse biology through categories such as species, genera, and varieties. What undergird the logics of biological nomenclature are extractive regimes of colonialism. The project of colonialism and its efforts to efficiently extract resources from the colonies spawned a colonial biology that named, categorized species in order to subsequently enlist and exploit them in regimes of colonial extraction. In a hierarchy of racial logics, some humans were considered superior to others, and some species to others. This paper contends that biological theories remain haunted by the legacies and logics of race that is fundamentally colonial and extractive. Such racial extractive logics span colonial regimes of human, animal and plant biologies. In this paper I argue that to understand the extractive systems of trade routes, plantation management of plants, animals and peoples, the choice and regimes of agricultural crops through plant breeding and transgenesis betrays the racial logics of colonial biology. I explore how these logics endure into modern day industrial neocolonial agriculture and the modern biological imagination.

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Short abstract:

Drawing from a EU-funded microbiome project in North Africa, I will analyse how scientific racial categories reproduce stereotypical conceptions about African populations, as they stem from a Western framework and thus overlook local conceptualizations of race.

Long abstract:

Microbiome research, together with metagenomic analysis, has significantly expanded our ability to study microbes and to explore their role in human health and diseases. As a scientific effort born in the Global North, the discipline regards the African continent as a mere sampling reservoir, involving local scientists and research centres only at a subordinate level (Allali et al. 2021). The asymmetrical collaborations between Western and African scientists raise several ethical issues concerning the extractivist nature of microbiome science, consent and information regarding biodata (Bader et al. 2023; Huttenhower, Finn, and McHardy 2023), and representational diversity within the discipline and in the academia (Mangola et al. 2022). However, the controversial usage of race in microbiome science and the related ethical problems remain in a blind spot of scholarly analysis, even if the discipline often reinforces or reintroduces problematic racist narratives (Maroney 2017). Drawing from a prolonged ethnographic study of an EU-funded human microbiome project in North Africa, I will address how international scientific collaborations replicate ahistorical and typological representations of North African populations. In this project, race is still an unescapable operational tool, but stems from a borrowed, hegemonic racial framework, which has its roots in the violence of colonial history, and overlooks local conceptualizations of race formation. Holding the macro and the micro levels together in one analytical lens, I wish to demonstrate how counter-reading racial constructs embedded in microbiome science enables scientists to design a better, more ethical science, and to resist present-day racist notions and practices.

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Short abstract:

What is the connection between the bio-behavioral data that are prospected from pregnant bodies in prenatal trials and speculative value? And who benefits?

Long abstract:

In clinical trials, enrolling a participant requires consent. Consent is one step in the data collection process that requires the extraction of raw data by organized labor. The data that is collected can include biological and behavioral samples like blood, fecal samples, breast milk, hair samples, cord blood, placenta, medical histories, and food diaries. In my recent book Weighing the Future I examined ongoing pregnancy trials in the US and UK. Pregnancy trials provide the bodies and data that are necessary for understanding epigenetic mechanisms connected to the developmental origins of health and disease. I situate pregnancy trials at the nexus of what I call racial-surveillance-biocapitalism. Black feminism and Black Marxism provide the theoretical framework for understanding how the power relations of exploitation that structured slavery remain relevant for understanding contemporary forms of exploitation in capitalist contexts across reproduction and in relation to race/racism. In this paper, I examine data that I did not get to include in the book to explore questions around the value of the pregnancy data beyond the clinical trials. To better understand forms of extraction and value in contemporary science, my analysis focuses on emerging discussions related to data sharing and intellectual property alongside my own data collection practices and the data collection processes of the clinical trial I ethnographically examined.