Carcerality and Justice in Postcolonial African Forensic Genetics

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - I

Abstract

Forensic science imagines justice through a carceral framework. But carcerality is rooted in colonial histories of racial domination. What happens, then, when forensic science is practiced in postcolonial contexts where concepts of social and racial justice coincide with entrenched ideas of criminal justice rooted in expanding data infrastructures? In January 2015, South Africa enacted a new law, the DNA Act, that mandated the creation of a national criminal DNA database, and that tasked the South African Police Service (SAPS) with building it. Over the past several years as SAPS has worked towards building data infrastructures to implement the DNA Act, university-based South African geneticists have also worked towards Africanizing forensic genomics. This paper considers the development of a new DNA profiler kit by researchers at a South African university, and the product’s initial local reception. The kit, which has been marketed to but not yet purchased by SAPS, is based on a perceived need to better account for the genetic diversity of South African ethnic groups, with hopes to improve future iterations of the kit by expanding to other African contexts. Interestingly, it is not imagined as profitable per se, but rather as socially important and legally responsible. Based on ethnographic research and interviews, this paper asks how competing forms of justice, racialized concepts of genetic diversity, and data securitization converge and transform one another in an emerging and expanding African forensic DNA data world.

Author

• Noah Tamarkin, Ohio State University