Description:

Featuring Dr. Duana Fullwiley, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University

In this talk Dr. Fullwiley explores how imperial, postcolonial, and present-day geopolitical borders have recursively informed—and been shaped by—understandings of human fitness and potential wellbeing. Embodying characteristics of “the line,” “the limit,” “the boundary,” and “the frame,” borders demarcate and define, while signaling judgments about human health and desirability. In this, they have also at times absorbed knowledge-making practices carried out among biomedical caregivers, scientists, and sick people regarding cultural and material engagements with bloods, proteins, genetic populations, and racialized bodies. She draws from three long-term ethnographic projects to query how the often invisible technologies of territorial space-making are wrapped up with racialized articulations of health/disease, normalcy/pathology, and life/death.

Dr. Fullwiley furthermore explores how current climatic and environmental threats, which disproportionately affect people in Sub-Saharan Africa, can create symptoms in people that are primed for medicalization when they are forced to migrate due to environmental degradation and resource extraction. She concludes by exploring how “people on the move,” emigrating from West Africa to southern Europe, use their own technologies of population, group boundedness, and sheer numbers to forge contemporary forms of world-making (and at times resistance) as they reimagine the powers of borders.

At stake is our contested yet shared planet, and possibilities for human solidarities across transient lines.

Duana Fullwiley is a literary anthropologist of science and medicine whose fieldwork with scientific experts, patients, and larger publics explores the interplay of genetics, health, and human-environmental relationships in Europe, Senegal, and the United States. She is the author of the award-winning books The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton, 2011) and Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (University of California press, 2024). She is currently at work on a new long-term project on human migration from West Africa to Europe with a focus on people’s narratives of success at all costs in light of the simultaneous rigidity and fluidity of borders (land and sea) that are increasingly marked by new technologies. This work also interrogates how environmental resource scarcity pushes people to migrate, or, rather, to simply move, in their quests for viable futures, stability, and health. She is particularly interested in how people draw from and create various forms of “tech” to forge relational trajectories that partially constitute possibilities for wellbeing and feelings of home.

Fullwiley has received fellowships and grants from the Fulbright Scholars Program to Senegal, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the National Science Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program at Harvard University, the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She currently teaches at Stanford University in the Department of Anthropology, with affiliations in the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as the Science, Technology and Society Program.