Race for Cures: Rethinking the Racial Logics of ‘Trust’in Biomedicine

This article examines the normative underpinnings of ‘trust talk’, asking how biomedical discourse constructs racial group boundaries and what implications this has for our understanding of the politics of medicine more broadly. Drawing upon a 2‐year multi‐method study of the world's largest stem cell research initiative and extending key insights from the sociology of race–ethnicity and social studies of science and medicine, this paper identifies three ways in which discourse in the stem cell field constructs racial group boundaries – through diversity outreach, clinical gatekeeping, and charismatic collaborations. In so doing, the paper also explicates counter‐narratives – medical racial profiling, subversive whiteness, and biopolitical minstrelsy – as forms of discursive resistance that challenge the normative underpinnings of recruitment discourse

Catching our breath: critical race STS and the carceral imagination

This article draws together science and technology studies and critical race theory to examine the proliferation and intensification of carceral approaches to governing human life. It argues for an expansive understanding of “the carceral” that extends well beyond the domain of policing, to include forms of containment that make innovation possible in the contexts of health and medicine, education and employment, border policies and virtual realities. In interrogating the relationship between innovation and containment, it urges scholars to consider, who and what are fixed in place––classified, corralled, and/or coerced—to enable technoscientific development? Finally, it proposes the cultivation of an abolitionist consciousness that fosters human agency and freedom with and against sciences and technologies

Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods

The facts, alone, will not save us. Social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society. Such narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible: It is 2064. A reparations initiative that allows victims of police brutality to regenerate organs is well underway. A major new component of the initiative will be unveiled for the fiftieth anniversary of the Ferguson uprising, but the largest biobank in the country has been repeatedly hit by raiders intent on selling stem cells on the white market. Aiyana and her team of Risers have to find a way to secure the cell depository and revitalize the movement. Fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment with speculative methods, challenge ever-present narratives of inevitability, anticipate new racial formations, and test different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies

A Lab of Their Own: Genomic sovereignty as postcolonial science policy

This paper analyzes the emergence of ‘genomic sovereignty’ policies as a newly popular way for postcolonial countries to frame their investment in genomics. It identifies three strands in the genealogy of this policy arena—the International Haplotype Mapping Project as a model and foil for postcolonial genomics; an emerging public health genomics field which stands in contrast to Western pursuits of personalized medicine; and North American drug companies increased focus on ethnic drug markets. I conceptualize postcolonial genomics as a nationalist project with contradictory tendencies—unifying and differentiating a diverse body politic, cultivating national scientific and commercial autonomy and dependence upon global knowledge networks and foreign capital. It argues that the ‘strategic calibration’ of socio-political versus biological taxonomies in postcolonial genomics creates two primary challenges for this arena, which I refer to heuristically as dilemmas of mapping and marketing

Cultura Obscura: Race, Power, and “Culture Talk” in the Health Sciences

This Article advances a critical race approach to the health sciences by examining “culture talk” as a discursive repertoire that attributes distinct beliefs, behaviors, and dispositions to ethno-racialized groups. Culture talk entails a twofold process of obfuscation – concealing the social reality of the people it describes and hiding the positionality of those who employ cultural generalizations. After tracing how culture talk circulates and reproduces racist narratives in and beyond the health sciences, I examine how cultural competency training in medical schools and diversity initiatives in stem cell research use the idiom of culture to manage and manufacture group differences. From culturing cells in the lab to enculturing people in the clinic, I apply the concept of coproduction to argue that culture talk is a precondition and product of scientific knowledge construction

Informed refusal: Toward a justice-based bioethics

‘‘Informed consent’’ implicitly links the transmission of information to the granting of permission on the part of patients, tissue donors, and research subjects. But what of the corollary, informed refusal? Drawing together insights from three moments of refusal, this article explores the rights and obligations of biological citizenship from the vantage point of biodefectors— those who attempt to resist technoscientific conscription. Taken together, the cases expose the limits of individual autonomy as one of the bedrocks of bioethics and suggest the need for a justice-oriented approach to science, medicine, and technology that reclaims the epistemological and political value of refusal

Prophets and Profits of Racial Science

Two hundred years in the future, overpopulation on Earth has compelled humanity to spread across the solar system, colonizing Mars and the Asteroid Belt, where several generations of humans have been born and raised as" Martians" and" Belters," respectively. This state of affairs is the premise of a book series adapted for television, called The Expanse. Unlike many speculative tales, the series presents a remarkably diverse cast that challenges contemporary racial and gender hierarchies while also signaling how racial vision and division may be reconfigured in the future. By focusing on the value of racial-ethnic classifications in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine, here Benjamin attends to the relationship between prophets of racial science (those who produce forecasts about inherent group differences) and profits of racial science (the benefits produced by such forecasts)