Bracketing off populations does not advance ethical reflection on EVCs: A reply to Kayser and Schneider

In a recent contribution to this journal, Kayser and Schneider reviewed the relevance of external visible characteristics (EVCs) for criminal investigation [1]. Their aim was to broaden the debate about the scientific, legal, and ethical dimensions of the use of EVCs for criminal investigation, which will help to achieve a firm legal basis for the application of EVCs eventually. While we applaud Kayser's and Schneider's overall very thoughtful and nuanced discussion of this topic, we were surprised to read that they suggest that a discussion of ‘the challenges of using problematic definitions of populations […] has to be kept separate from using EVCs’ (p. 158). In contrast to these authors, we contend that questions about defining populations – both at the level of scientific research, and the application of EVCs in criminal investigation – lie at the core of most social, ethical, and legal issues raised by the translation of EVCs into forensic and police practice

Performative Circulations: On Flows and Stops in Forensic DNA Practices

The article focuses on circulations and what circulations bring about. It does so by following the movements of DNA through different domains of forensic practice. By zooming in on DNA and the role it came to play in the Dutch Marianne Vaatstra case, the paper demonstrates the performative work of circulations and invites to attend empirically to circulations as an object of research. The article is organized along three steps, in which it is argued that: circulations bring about identities; that circulations make context; circulations are permanent and can only be stopped actively. In the analysis, circulation is no longer to be understood as a process of transmission, as a simple movement of people, commodities, or ideas from one place to another. Rather, the conclusion invites to attend to circulation as a performative event. An event that co-shapes not only humans and things as they move through space and time, but also the contexts in which this happen in situated manners

Keeping race at bay: familial DNA research, the ‘Turkish Community,’ and the pragmatics of multiple collectives in investigative practice

In this contribution, we analyze the recently adjudicated Milica van Doorn rape and murder case. In this case, committed in 1992, no suspect could be identified until investigatory actors employed familial DNA searching in 2017. Crucially, familial DNA typing raised the possibility of ethnic and racial stereotyping and profiling, particularly against the background of the first case in which familial DNA typing was used in the Netherlands: the Marianne Vaatstra case, which from the start had been marred by controversy about the ethnicity of the unknown perpetrator. In our analysis, we show how criminal justice actors managed this potential for racialization through strategically mobilizing and carefully managing multiple collectives. Drawing on the notions of multiplicity and non-coherence, we show we do not only empirically trace the situated ethics and pragmatics of familial DNA research in this specific case, but we also develop a theoretical argument on the multiple and non-coherent character of race itself and its attendant ethical, political, and methodological possibilities and obligations

Race, time and folded objects: the HeLa error

Given their commitment to practices science studies have bestowed considerable attention upon objects. We have the boundary object, the standardized package, the network object, the immutable mobile, the fluid object, even a fire object has entered the scene. However, these objects do not provide us with a way of understanding their historicity. They are timeless, motionless pictures rather than things that change over time, and while enacting 'historical moments' they do not make visible the histories they contain within them. What kind of object could embody history and make that history visible? We might learn from Michel Serres about objects and time, and about the way that histories cannot be left behind. The image of a dog cadaver, constantly orbiting a projectile in space, might turn out helpful here. Inspired by Serres, I suggest the folded object is a way to attend to the temporality and spatiality of objects. In this paper, I explore this new object by unravelling the history of a DNA reference sequence. I show how, ever since it was produced in the early 1980s, attempts have been made to filter race out of the sequence. That effort has failed due to what one could call 'political noise'. Making and remaking the sequence have left traces that cannot be erased