'Helping to organize DNA.' Professor Fullwiley in the field at the Laboratoire de Biologie Moléculaire, LBV CHU, Aristide Le Dantec Hospital in Dakar, Senegal working on a collaborative sickle cell trait study. 2006.
'Asking questions at the bench.' Professor Fullwiley in the field at a University of Chicago lab where researchers are attempting to discern the social and genetic components that yield higher rates of aggressive prostate cancer in African-American men. 2007.
William James Hall 336
(617) 496-4987
Anthropology of Science; Medical Anthropology; Race; Health Disparities; Global Health Politics; especially in France, Senegal, West Africa, and the United States
As an ethnographer deeply committed to scholarship that broadens our understanding of the contemporary world, by engaging with technologies that reconfigure aspects of it, I work on the social production of scientific and medical knowledge. I am also concerned with how cultural practices in the life sciences draw from—and also delimit—various aspects of bodily experience and biological change.
I have mostly worked in major cities in France, Senegal and the United States. Around the globe human concepts of self, group and other inflect the biological questions we pose for ourselves as proposals for the life sciences. My in-progress book manuscript on sickle cell anemia research and care in Paris and the Senegalese capital Dakar started out as an attempt to chronicle how Senegalese patients, as a ‘population,’ were classed by French and American geneticists as having the most ‘mild form’ of sickle cell anemia (HbSS) of any group within Africa and among its diaspora. During my fieldwork I delved into various field sites where the discourse of mild Senegalese sickle cell circulated. These ranged from specialized clinics to research labs, from ‘traditional’ healing clinics to market places, from peoples’ homes to patient advocacy groups, from health ministries to historical archives. In the end, I found that histories of race and ideas of human difference within former French West Africa mapped onto contemporary care regimes—or rather voids of care—where resources for this disease paled in the face of other public health ‘priorities’ for Africa. In the context of scant funding for sickle cell in Dakar, humans (modern and traditional healers) and the environment have rushed into the breach to provide phyto-therapeutic agents that reportedly stave off the most serious effects of red blood cell sickling. I am currently interested in how the principle plant used by patients in Dakar may provoke biological changes that geneticists have long attributed to a series of single nucleotide polymorphisms around the sickle cell gene, called the ‘Senegalese haplotype,’ rather than this mix of cultural and environmental activity.
My second project is an ethnographic study into what I am calling the ‘molecularization of race.’ This field research takes place in four American genomics laboratories where scientific practitioners use ‘race’ in their struggle to describe human difference for molecular genetic studies. For some, the hope is that by working from social descriptors of culturally understood phenotypic traits, they will capture shared biological, societal and environmental ‘risks’ that aggregate to make African-Americans and Latinos sicker than ‘White’ Americans. Others believe that the biogenetic component of race is not a ‘fiction,’ or social construct, and they are determined to localize its role in complex disease and pharmacological susceptibility. I am also interested in the current social configuration of this new genetics of race. I am finding that my scientist-informants often belong to the ethnic/racial groups that they hope to help, thus a uniquely American form of governmentality is in play. It is clear that many geneticists of color fear that ‘they’ will be left out of the genomic revolution unless they recruit their ‘own communities’ for genetic research. My work chronicles their success in enrolling ‘under-represented’ groups in this relatively new enterprise, as well as how the technologies they operationalize for isolating the genetic aspects of continental ancestry are increasing sold and used for reconstructing personal, family and community origin stories.
2007
Co-authored: Deborah A. Bolnick, Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, Richard S. Cooper, Joan H. Fujimura, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Jonathan Marks, Ann Morning, Alondra Nelson, Pilar Ossorio, Jenny Reardon, Susan M. Reverby, Kimberly TallBear.
The Science and Business of Ancestry Testing. Science 318 (5849): 399-400.
2007
Co-authored: Lundy Braun, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Duana Fullwiley, Evelynn M Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, William Quivers, Susan M Reverby, and Alexandra E Shields.
Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?
PLoS Medicine 4(9): 1423-1428 (e271).
2007
Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship.
Solicited manuscript. BioSocieties 2(2):221-237.
2007
The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Racial Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice. Science as Culture 16(1):1-30.
2006
Biosocial Suffering: Order and Illness in Urban West Africa. BioSocieties 1(4): 421-438.
2004
From Discriminate Biopower to Everyday Biopolitics: Views on Sickle cell Testing in Dakar. Medical Anthropology 23(2):157-194.
2004
Contingences de la maladie: les politiques culturelles de la souffrance en regard du trait drépanocytaire AS au Senegal. (Contingencies of illness: the cultural politics of sickle cell trait suffering in Senegal) in Agnès Lainé (ed.) La drépanocytose: Regards croisés sur une maladie orpheline. (Paris: Karthala).
1998
Race, biologie et maladie: la difficile organisation des patients atteints de drépanocytose aux Etats-Unis. (Race, Biology, and Illness: Barriers to Sickle Cell Patient Group Organization in the United States). Sciences Sociales et Santé 16(3): 129-157
In the fall of 2007 I am teaching a course on the anthropology of science. Students can access the course website here
Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University