Jenny Reardon

Reardon PosterDirector, Science & Justice Research Center, UC, Santa Cruz

The Anti-Racist Democratic Genome?

Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

The opening decade of this millennium witnessed genome scientists, policy makers, critical race theorists and world leaders proclaiming the anti-racist democratic potential of human genomics.  These views stand in stark contrast to the 1990s concern that genomics might create new forms of racism.  This lecture explores this shift, both why it happened and what it reveals about emerging challenges for understanding issues of race and racism in the genomic age.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of American Studies, Anthropology, and Spanish & Portuguese. This program is also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, The Meanings of Race.

Reardon PicBiography (provided by the speaker)

Jenny Reardon is an associate professor of sociology and faculty affiliate in the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  She also founded and directs the UCSC Science and Justice Research Center.  Her book, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, was published with Princeton University Press in 2005.  Reardon is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking work in race and genomics and science and justice, as well as her skills working across the natural and social sciences.  In all her work, she seeks to innovate spaces and languages capable of facilitating reflection and deliberation in an age increasingly mediated by emergent forms of technoscience.  Her writing has appeared in a diverse range of popular and academic venues, including Science, Nature, Current Anthropology, the Social Studies of Sciencedifferences, and the San Francisco Chronicle.  She is currently at work on her second manuscript, The Post-Genomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome, a book she has been writing while on fellowship at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland.

 Video of the Lecture