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FOLK – From racial types to DNA sequences

The front page of the UNESCO Courier showing the first expert Statement on race, 1950. (UNESCO Courier July-August 1950/UNESCO.) The front page of the UNESCO Courier showing the first expert Statement on race, 1950. (UNESCO Courier July-August 1950/UNESCO.)

Race, ethnicity, ancestry, and human genetic variation 1945-2013

Workshop 1
April 2-4, 2014

How do social and cultural notions of 'ethnicity', 'race' and ancestry interact with the production of scientific knowledge about genetic ancestry and human genetic variation?

The workshop dealt with this question, including its ethical dimension. We discussed ongoing processes and historical questions about the continuity or discontinuity between the racial typologies of “old” physical anthropology and present day human genetic variation research.

Image: The front page of the UNESCO Courier showing the first expert Statement on race, 1950. (UNESCO Courier July-August 1950/UNESCO.)

Participants and paper titles (by invitation only):

  • Jenny Bangham
    "Blood groups and the rhetoric of ‘neutrality’ in mid-twentieth century human genetics"

  • Hallvard Fossheim 
    "Population studies and the ethics of representativeness"

  • Kriti Kapila 
    "Indi-gene: On Some Locations of Culture in Contemporary India"

  • Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin 
    "Exceptional and fundamental: Indigenous people in human biology and postcolonial science"

  • Jon Røyne Kyllingstad 
    "Constructions of biological difference between Sami and Non-Sami Scandinavians (1930-2000)"

  • Åsa M. Larsson 
    "In our bones? Genetics, archaeology and the search for ancestors in Scandinavia"

  • Ageliki Lefkaditou 

    "From Calipers to Sequencers: Physical Anthropology in Greece and the Construction of Racial and National Identity, 1950’s to present"

  • Amade M’charek 
    "Race, Region and Time: Or the forensic presence of the past"

  • Gisli Palsson 
    "Human variation: A biosocial perspective"

  • Katharina Schramm 

    "What is (in) a Population? Scientific and Political Representations in South Africa"

  • Edna Maria Suárez-Díaz 
    "Race, ethnicity and populations in post-revolutionary Mexico"

  • Ricardo Ventura Santos 
    "Indians, mestizos and shades of “primitiveness”: Human biological diversity research in Brazil in the post World War II period"