Events & Calendars CHI Salon: "The Indian in the Freezer: The Genomic Quest for Indigeneity"

Visiting Professor of Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies Jennifer Hamilton will present her new book manuscript, The Indian in the Freezer: The Genomic Quest for Indigeneity (under contract with the University of Washington Press). The book explores what she terms “the genomic quest for indigeneity,” and follows people, scientific objects, biomedical discourses and capital over time and in space in order to provide a rich ethnographic account of how race, sex and sexuality continue to inform and shape contemporary biomedical inquiry. Hamilton argues that indigeneity is a productive category, particularly in terms of how genomics is imagined. She does the empirical work of tracing how indigeneity circulates and how it impacts the creation of diagnostic technologies and therapeutics as part of a larger intervention in ongoing discussions of how and why health disparities cannot be reduced to naturalized narratives of biological difference. The overall point of the book is to take seriously that if we accept, possibly embrace, the speculative and contingent yet material and consequential dimensions of genomics and the life sciences more broadly, we can potentially shift scientific modes of inquiry to be more inclusive of other possible worlds.