Events

January 27, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall

Carceral Relations: Building a Forensic DNA Database in South Africa Dr. Noah Tamarkin Cornell University

ABSTRACT: Based on ethnographic research conducted among South African Police Service’s forensic science division between 2017 and 2024, this paper asks: what happens when forensic genetics becomes a prominent part of policing and legal frameworks in a postcolonial context where science, race, and law have all been deeply contested? In 2015, South Africa implemented a law that established a national forensic DNA database. The goal of the database is to match DNA profiles produced from the saliva, blood, and other bodily traces found at crime scenes with those of criminal suspects, but the result has also been to limit ideas of postapartheid justice to carceral containment. Indeed, advocates for establishing and expanding South Africa’s DNA database demanded it in the name of human rights, claiming that it would solve crime and ultimately safeguard their rights to live in safety and security. However, unlike these advocates who could imagine their own safety as contingent on others’ confinement, the everyday work of bringing the database into being through collection of evidence, extraction of genetic data, and production of genetic profiles entails forms of proximity through which police, victims, suspects, and witnesses navigate deeply unequal shared spaces. This paper considers these interactions, paying particular attention to moments that disrupt carceral logics. Might there be possibility in these ruptures for another kind of politics of justice?

BIOGRAPHY: Noah Tamarkin is an associate professor of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University and a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa (Duke University Press 2020). He is currently writing a book on the introduction and implementation of South Africa’s national forensic DNA database, the forensic genetics networks that it has fostered, and its implications for postapartheid South African and global politics of surveillance statecraft, human rights, and carcerality. His next project considers trans health as experimental practice through which bodies and expertise are reconfigured.

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Tamarkin’s talk.

February 3, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall

“World’s on Fire but We’re Still Having Kids”: Reproductive Reluctance and the Future of Making Kin Dr. Janelle Lamoreaux University of Arizona

ABSTRACT: Amid lingering environmentalist concern about overpopulation, many governments have expressed fears about fertility rate decline. Largely viewed as a problem of social and economic stability, the question of why people are having fewer children is continuously asked. Starting from the premise that fertility rate decline is in itself not a problem, or a solution, this talk interprets the fertility feelings and practices of young adults in Southern Arizona as a kind of reproductive reluctance. Based on collaborative research with students, I discuss climate change and concern about the ecological environment as one of many factors leading young adults to question the kinds of future kin they desire. Educational systems, reproductive restrictions, health care institutions, and “hateful environments” also contribute to reproductive reluctance, extending the boundaries of fertility decision-making well beyond the individual. The talk concludes by asking how political, economic and ecological futures might be creatively reimagined through understanding reproductive reluctance among young people today.

BIOGRAPHY: Janelle Lamoreaux is Associate Professor and Associate Director at University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology. She conducts research at the intersection of medical anthropology and science and technology studies, with particular attention to gender, reproduction and the environment. Her book Infertile Environments (Duke 2023) addresses growing concern over the relationship of chemical toxins to reproductive health through an ethnographic study of epigenetic research practices in Nanjing, China. She is currently conducting research on the cryoconservation of gametes as a means of ensuring Earthly and extraterrestrial survival, as well as a collaborative study of reproductive reluctance and fertility rate decline in Southern Arizona, USA.

February 10, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall

The Story of Sovaldi^™: How Intellectual Property Matters In Places That Do Not Dr. Zahra Hayat University of British Columbia, Vancouver

ABSTRACT: Pakistan has among the world’s lowest drug prices, and almost no drug patents filed by Western multinational corporations. Despite the absence of these quintessential barriers to pharmaceutical access, it is afflicted by severe shortages of basic lifesaving and palliative drugs. Drawing from my broader research on these seeming paradoxes of access, in this talk I examine the unprecedented arrival in Pakistan of Silicon Valley-based company Gilead Sciences’ revolutionary Hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, just a year after its U.S. launch. Priced at $84,000 per course—$1,000 per pill—in the U.S., Sovaldi was sold in Pakistan at only $2 per pill, enabling the government to establish free Hepatitis C treatment centers across the country. Complicating the common narrative of Gilead’s benevolence in bringing Sovaldi to Pakistan, I suggest that Pakistan’s insignificance in global pharmaceutical circuits was a paradoxical condition of possibility of its access to the drug. More broadly, I suggest that given the increasing prominence of biological drugs in new pharmaceutical development, understanding the relationship between intellectual property and access requires broadening our focus beyond patents to a broader rubric of ‘pharmaceutical intellectual property’, which exceeds any individual legal property form.

BIOGRAPHY: Zahra Hayat is a medical anthropologist and lawyer. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2024-2026). Her research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology and law, examining how global regimes of pharmaceutical pricing, intellectual property, and narcotics control shape access to lifesaving and palliative drugs in the Global South. Dr. Hayat received her PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley in 2022. She obtained her first law degree from Oxford University, followed by an LL.M. from Yale Law School. Before starting her PhD, she practiced law in the San Francisco Bay Area for five years as a mental health advocate for children in foster care, and subsequently as an intellectual property litigator. 

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Hayat’s talk.

February 17, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall

Continents Apart: Disability, Thermal Inequality, and the Narrowing of Worlds Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat University of California, Los Angeles

ABSTRACT: For some people, climate change has quite literally made their world smaller. This talk focuses on the ways in which rising temperatures have reshaped how certain people—frequently disabled and/or experiencing chronic illness—relate to their bodies, their homes, and their worlds. Drawing on research with people who experience thermoregulatory symptoms, I argue that the narrowing of the world is both a consequence of how heat disproportionately impacts disabled people and a strategy utilized by disabled people to survive in what are increasingly hostile climates.

BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, and the Institute for Society & Genetics. His first book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021; Bloomsbury India, 2022), is the winner of three awards: the RAI Wellcome Medal (from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Wellcome Trust), the Edie Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing (from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology), and the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences (from the American Institute of Indian Studies). His current book project—titled Swelter: The Fate of Our Bodies in a Warming World—is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the plight of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. This book reflects on the existential and planetary crisis posed by extreme heat, but from the perspective of our bodies as they experience this crisis. Swelter will be published by Crown in the United States, and Picador in the United Kingdom. Dr. Venkat is also the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab. His work has been funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and most recently, by a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, which is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty.

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Venkat’s talk.

February 24, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Krystal A. Smalls University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

March 3, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Anna T. Browne Ribeiro University of Louisville

March 31, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin Wellesley College

April 7, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Jennifer C. Hsieh University of Michigan

April 14, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Usha Reena Rungoo Harvard University

April 28, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Vivian Lu Rice University