Race as a Technology in Medicine and Epidemiology: Contrasting Germany and the US

• In Event: Race and/as Technology - II

Abstract

The proposed paper intends to discuss how thinking race as a technology helps understanding the usage of visible and invisible racial and ethnic categories in medical and epidemiological research. Drawing on fieldwork in Germany it will especially focus on the differences between clinical/epidemiological research and health politics in the US and Germany: in the US, political efforts to even out racial (and gender) health inequalities have e.g. led to representing “all relevant groups” in clinical studies, with the underlying notion that these social identities correspond to relatively distinct kinds of biological bodies (Epstein). In epidemiology, technologies like whole genome sequencing become racialised and racialise, when looking for links between disease and racial variation in susceptabilities.
In Germany, a renaissance of medical (and other life science) research into human diversity is only in its infancy, but an emerging field. But different from the US and partly because of the NS history, we find an “absent presence” of race (M’charek et al): instead of ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’, categories that seem less politically problematic are used, such as "Migrationshintergrund" (immigrant background), that still imply aspects of race. If race is a technique, how does it produce medical diversity knowledge and practices in these nationally diverse ways?

Author

• Andrea zur Nieden, Institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg, Germany