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Paper short abstract

The paper draws on the sociology of associations and critical kinship studies to examine how commercial DNA technologies generate unexpected, contested, and emotionally laden processes of making and unmaking family.

Paper long abstract

The use of commercial genetic testing in genealogical research has increased rapidly worldwide in recent years. These technologies have a significant impact on people's access to information about biological relations. Drawing on Latour's sociology of associations the paper follows the journey of a DNA saliva test through a series of translations: from a living room to a laboratory, from a laboratory into digital databases, and from databases into socio-material networks that reconfigure relationships between diverse actors. The databases of commercial service providers house the DNA profiles of millions of people, and with a few clicks a user may connect shared DNA sequences with ancestral birthplaces, discover new siblings, or expose hidden family secrets. Through ethnographic observations in online search groups and an in-depth case study of one person's written account of searching for biological father, we trace the processes of problematisation, interessement, enrolment, and mobilisation that structure these searches. We show how saliva acquires new agency as it passes through successive translations. We demonstrate how potential relatives must be actively recruited and how affective intensities become central to stabilising, or destabilising, the resulting networks. Crucially, we show how DNA databases do not merely reveal existing collectives but actively produce, dissolve, and reorganise them: old kinship assemblages fracture while new ones are assembled from heterogeneous elements. The paper draws on the sociology of associations and critical kinship studies to examine how commercial DNA technologies generate unexpected, contested, and emotionally laden processes of making and unmaking family.