Collating Publics In Collections Of Human Biological Material And Data 1

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

The panel seeks to explore how particular ‘publics’ – of citizens, stakeholders, populations, or otherwise – are put together through collections of human biological materials and data. Contributions study how publics are co-produced in technoscientific, social and political orders that shape the formation of repositories containing human biological materials and data (as applied in e.g. the medical, forensic, migration policy context). Papers address, but are not limited to, the following questions: how database systems and their classifications configure ontological entities with particular normative ascriptions of publics; how practices of taking samples, producing, storing and exchanging materials and data, and governing databases enact, affect or mobilize notions of citizenship; how political issues produced by and reflected in such databases are negotiated and thereby (re)make affected publics and forms of (biological) citizenship; how the materiality of database infrastructures and networks that make databases work enable or constrain imaginaries of collectives; how such databases give rise to ecologies of participation that mobilize engagement. In this panel contributions present empirically rich and conceptually informed reflections on the relations between the collection of human biological materials and data, and the formation of diverse publics and forms of citizenship, across different cultural locations, contexts of application and forms of storage. With the contributions to this panel, we thereby explore the empirical, theoretical and political significance of how human collectives are imagined in practices of collecting.
In this first session papers are assembled which reflect about how data collection entails different imaginations of publics in various contexts.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Collating publics in collections of human biological material and data

Chair

• Torsten H Voigt, RWTH Aachen University

Individual Presentations

• Imagined Publics In Medical Research Collections: Tracing Circulations And The Making Of Public Value(s) - Erik Aarden, University of Vienna

• Infrastructuring data-publics: Implications of design and governance of transnational biometric database systems - Nina Amelung, University of Minho

• Evidentiary Status of DNA Testing for Family Relatedness in Danish Family Migration Politics - Linda Lund Pedersen, London School Of Economics & Political Science

• Sorting Apart: Sampling Practices and Shaping Publics in DNA Studies of “Roma” - Veronika Lipphardt, University College Freiburg, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg; Mihai Surdu, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg,University College Freiburg

Session Organizer

• Nina Amelung, University of Minho