Race Matter: On the Absent Presence of Race in Forensic Identification

This ethnographic project on race in forensic practice aims to study how technologies of identification shape race. The focus is on ‘face-making’ in forensic identification; i.e. the reconstruction of faces of unknown persons, a practice entwined with ‘race-making’. In five subprojects the study investigates: How technologies of facial identification in and outside laboratories enact race (subprojects 1-3); How versions of race change as knowledge moves across sites (subproject 4); The mechanism through which race becomes an absent present object, i.e. an object that appears to the surface, e.g. in discourse, to then go underground to hide in the routines and technologies of science, e.g. in genetic markers (subproject 5). The overall objective of this interdisciplinary project is to develop theoretical concepts and methods to grasp the absent present object race. The project goes beyond the social constructivist paradigm, by taking the biological into account. It attends to the materiality of race, i.e. the ways race is shaped as a set of relations between the biological, the social and the technical. This project is innovative in several ways. It is the first to comprehensively study race and forensics, a highly relevant field where knowledge circulates constantly between science and society. The ethnographic subprojects are innovative in the way they compare frontier science of genetics to every day practices, such as facial composite drawings and skull-based reconstructions. Because of its focus on race-in-practice, this project will make a major contribution to the social sciences by providing tools to theorize the materiality of race. Finally, this innovative project comprises a multi-sited ethnography that follows routes of knowledge into and out of the laboratory to various sites in society.