'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 | e-mail
Research
Anthropology of Science; Medical Anthropology; Race; Health Disparities; Global Health Politics; especially in France, Senegal, West Africa, and the United States.
Biography
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.
Publications
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals
2008 Fullwiley, Duana. The Biologistical Construction of Race: `Admixture' Technology and the New Genetic Medicine. Social Studies of Science 38(5): 695–735.
2007 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 Lundy Braun, Duana Fullwiley, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, William Quivers, Susan M. Reverby, & Alexandra Shields. Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They? PLoS Medicine 4(9): 1423-1428.
2007 Fullwiley, Duana. Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship. BioSocieties 2(2): 221-237.
2007 Fullwiley, Duana. The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Racial Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice. Science as Culture 16(1): 1-30.
2006 Fullwiley, Duana. Biosocial Suffering: Order and Illness in Urban West Africa. BioSocieties 1(4): 421-438.
2004 Fullwiley, Duana. From Discriminate Biopower to Everyday Biopolitics: Views on Sickle cell Testing in Dakar. Medical Anthropology 23(2):157-194.
1998 Fullwiley, Duana. 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.
Book Chapters
2008 Fullwiley, Duana. The Molecularization of Race and Institutions of Difference: Pharmacy and Public Science after the Genome (edited reprint of Science as Culture article). In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. (Studies in Medical Anthropology). Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson (eds). Rutgers University Press, pp. 149-171.
2004 Fullwiley, Duana. 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), pp. 243-277
Commentaries/Reviews
2008 Bolnick, Deborah A., Duana Fullwiley, Jonathan Marks, Susan M. Reverby, Jonathan Kahn, Kimberly Tallbear, Jenny Reardon, Richard S. Cooper, Troy Duster, Joan H. Fujimura, Jay S. Kaufman, Ann Morning, Alondra Nelson, and Pilar Ossorio. The Legitimacy of Genetic Ancestry Tests. Science 22 February 319: 1039-1040.
2008 Fullwiley, Duana. Out From Under the Skin: Disease Etiology, Biology, and Society: A Commentary on Robert Aronowitz. Social Science & Medicine 67(1): 14-17.
2008 Fullwiley, Duana. Can DNA ‘Witness’ Race?: Forensic Uses of an Imperfect Ancestry Testing Technology, Genewatch, from The Council on Responsible Genetics 21(3-4): 12-14.
Teaching
2008-09
A2735 The Anthropology of Science
AAAS199 Delimiting Health Disparities in the African Diaspora
AAAS97 Sophomore Tutorial: Race and Humanism
A2736 Medical Anthropology of Contemporary Africa
Links
African and African American Studies, Harvard University
