"Diversity Science: Race, Gender, and the Gift in Genomic Research" by James Battle, PhD.

Event Date: 

Wednesday, May 18, 2016 - 12:30pm to 2:00pm

Event Location: 

  • Center for Black Studies Research
  • 4603 South Hall

 

James Battle, Visiting Professor in the Department of Black Studies at UCSB, is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. A graduate of the UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program, Dr. Battle’s work focuses on the medical anthropology and sociology of The Black Atlantic, creolization, and the political economy of race. A member of the Race, Genomics and the Media Working Group at UCSC, his current research examines the discursive politics of race since the genomic revolution.
 
Dr. Battle will discuss “Diversity Science,” or knowledge production emerging from the clinical recruitment of racial difference, both as researchers and subjects. Battle shows that race served as a proxy in two different examples: an ethnographic narrative of the imagined strategic role of diversity in pharmaceutical research and a relation of how researchers in his own project viewed US African Americans both in terms of tracing sub-Saharan ancestry as well as an admixed population. He submits that historical inequalities embedded within these narratives reflect complex sets of social relationships of biological consequence that shape unequal forms of exchange and asymmetrical notions of trust.
 
This colloquium honors the work of our respected late colleagues Otis Madison and Horatio Roque Ramirez, faculty in Black Studies and Chicano Studies.
 
Otis Madison was a Research Fellow in the Center for Black Studies and Lecturer in the Black Studies Department. His areas of interest included United States legal history, U.S. race relations, race relations and the law, Black American political history, and political violence.
 
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez was Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies who was regarded as an expert on the topic of political asylum with an underlying and consistent focus on gender identity, sexuality, and HIV status as well as domestic and gang-related forms of persecution and violence.