ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Materializing DNA in Forensic-Memorial Practices

• In Event: Activist Epistemics and Artefacts 1

English Abstract

This paper examines DNA as a form of activist demand within contemporary forensic practices involved in recovering victims of Francoist repression exhumed from mass graves. It investigates how genetic analysis has acquired a social presence in these exhumation processes, becoming a site where scientific authority, legal frameworks, memorialist activism and reparative expectations intersect.

DNA —an intangible biological materiality— contributes to the construction of a space where forensic experts, relatives of the disappeared and memorialist organisations interact under conditions marked by asymmetries of power, divergent expectations and shared political urgency. In this sense, we tentatively propose that the scientised mass grave could be interpreted as a contact zone (Pratt, 1991) for understanding the complexity of the relationships present in the assemblage of the grave. Within the contact zones, knowledge is not simply transmitted from professionals to citizens; it is negotiated, contested and continually reconfigured. The memorialist movement's engagement with DNA is both epistemic and political. Activists frame genetic identification as a right and as a vehicle for reclaiming historical presence, while also highlighting the emotional and moral weight carried by biological traces.

Drawing on technical exhumation’s reports, interviews with workers in exhumations and genetic laboratories, and fieldnotes from memorialist assemblies, the paper argues that public understanding of DNA in the context of exhumations in southern Spain must be understood through these activist epistemics. DNA’s materiality, far from fixed, emerges within contact zones where communities and experts collectively redefine what scientific practices can contribute to historical memory and to the relief of individual and collective mourning processes that are still open.

Author

• Lucía Expósito-Cívico, University of Granada