ADI forthcoming events- 18 and 19 February, Dr Rick W.W.Smith
In Cold Blood: How Genome Science Makes Indigeneity Molecular
Seminar with Dr Rick W.A.Smith, Dartmouth College, respondant Professor Emma Kowal, Deakin University
Tuesday 18 February, 2020
10.00am – 12.00pm
Deakin Burwood Corporate Centre (BCC)
221 Burwood Hwy, Burwood
Abstract
Non-Indigenous peoples are increasingly turning to genome technologies to claim Indigenous belonging without other meaningful connections to Indigenous peoples. These claims work against Indigenous sovereignty by attempting to reduce Indigenous belonging to a question of shared DNA while obscuring the broader social, cultural, historical, political, and material relations through which many Indigenous peoples define themselves. Drawing from and building upon critiques of genome science and its role in anti-Indigenous formations, this talk seeks to understand the scientific processes through which Indigeneity is made molecular and how genetic claims to Indigeneity become possible. I present a reanalysis of a cryopreserved blood collection that was assembled in the 1990s for research into ancient demographic histories among Indigenous peoples in North America. Tracing the history of the collection’s assembly and analysis, I show how notions of purity shaped which samples were included and excluded in many previous studies. Working from a framework that centers Indigenous sovereignty rather than genetic purity, I analyzed DNA from samples that had been excluded from previous studies. This reanalysis not only reveals the invisibilized effects of settler colonialism on genetic variation in North America, but also serves to challenge and reconfigure the conditions of possibility through which Indigeneity is made molecular.
Registrations: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/rick-wa-smith-seminar-tickets-85430507949
————————————————————————————
Imperial Terroir: Toward A Queer Molecular Ecology of Colonial Masculinities
Public Lecture by Dr Rick W.A.Smith, Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College
Wednesday 19 February, 2020
4.00 – 5.30pm
Deakin Downtown
Level 12/727 Collins Street, Melbourne
Abstract
Male violence is fundamental to the formation and ongoing existence of settler colonial states. In accounting for histories of settler colonialism, evolutionary approaches have often been used to locate the origins of this violence in biology and rationalize the social orders of the colony as inevitable outcomes of nature. Given this history, queer and Indigenous critiques of settler governance are essential in order to track the ways that racist heteropatriarchal regimes of power emerge through colonial masculinities, not as inevitable consequences of biology, but as historically-contingent processes. In questioning the origins of colonial violence, however, it is important that such critiques not entirely abandon questions of nature, but reframe them by offering creative accounts of bodies and reckoning with the ways colonial masculinity makes itself felt across human and more-than-human ecologies. Here, I argue that colonial masculinities are recent historical inventions that took shape over the last five centuries as creations of colonialism. Given these historical contingencies, I work to shift questions of nature from maleness itself to the naturecultures that colonial masculinities bring into being, tracing some of the emerging molecular ecologies of the colony.
Registrations: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/rick-w-a-smith-public-lecture-tickets-85426626339