Event

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.