Long abstract:

In clinical transplantation, tissue 'matching' is thought most likely between patients and donors of common 'ethnic ancestry' who are understood to be distantly related. "Mixed raced" people, whose ancestries confound distinctions of racial taxonomy, are thus problematic: bodily, mixed patients are more challenging to locate matching donors for because of their genetic 'rarity'; socially, they present a problem for conventional 'community'-based participation or ‘donor recruitment’ methods targeting minoritized spaces (e.g. traditionally Black churches). This is thought to be compounded by an apparent recent 'demographic boom' in mixed raced people in the UK and the country’s perceived 'mixed' ethnic future. As such, these genetically rare bodies are, contradictorily, increasingly common, leading to more frequent inability to find a match for mixed patients.

The mixed-raced body is seen, then, as problematic for participation work or recruitment efforts that vivify ideas of coherent racialized groups (e.g. the 'African Caribbean community'). But, I argue, it also stands to provide an epistemic reorientation away from the racialised thinking that has striated donor recruitment to date.

The paper analyses policy, social/traditional media coverage and ethnographic data related to mixed-raced blood stem cell donor recruitment work in the UK. It confronts how racialised logics of recruitment reproduce particular racialised ways of knowing bodies, and how the capacious notion of mixedness – with its attendant discourse of demographic futurity – is both a challenge and an opportunity to break with the dominant racialised framing of recruitment work.