Curious about race: Generous methods and modes of knowing in practice

Abstract

What is race? And how does it figure in different scientific practices? To answer these questions, I suggest that we need to know race differently. Rather than defining race or looking for one conclusive answer to what it is, I propose methods that are open-ended, that allow us to follow race around, while remaining curious as to what it is. I suggest that we pursue generous methods. Drawing on empirical examples of forensic identification technologies, I argue that the slipperiness of race—the way race and its politics inexorably shift and change—cannot be fully grasped as an ‘object multiple’. Race, I show, is not race: The same word refers to different phenomena. To grasp this, I introduce the notion of the affinity concept. Drawing on the history of race, along with contemporary work in forensic genetics, the affinity concept helps us articulate how race indexes three different scientific realities: race as object, race as method, and race as theory. These three different, yet interconnected realities, contribute to race’s slipperiness as well as its virulence.

The politics of face and the trouble with race: Exploring relations at the interface between the individual and the collective in forensic practice

“…In our more in-depth discussion of the contributions in this special issue below, we highlight what forms of address and care race may require. M’charek (2023) examines how race is not simply an object multiple, but also operates as method and theory in these practices, while Granja and Machado (2023) examine how forensic geneticists navigate the fraught epistemological and political character of DNA phenotyping. Second, we also further complicate approaches to biological race, demonstrating the multiple and not necessarily commensurable practices of making and seeing difference in these practices, including conceptions of the normal, the average, and the standard, at work in the practices studied by Jong (2023).…”

“…In her piece in this edited volume, ‘Curious about race: Generous methods and modes of knowing in practice’, M’charek (2023) explores what we can learn about race by attending to the face and practices of face-making, and crucially, what mode of attention we could bring to the fraught realities of race. While earlier approaches to the production and making of race have demonstrated its multiple, relational, and absent-present character, her analysis takes this mode of analysis a crucial step further by not focusing solely on the multiplicity of race as an object, but on the different ways it operates.…”

“…Historically tracing and disentangling these three operations of the affinity concept ‘race’, and extending this analysis into the present, her contribution is also a call for a generous method of engaging with race and its multiple operations across sites and contexts, including practices of forensic geneticists. Generous methods, she argues, ‘embody an ethos of “getting out of our way” for our objects of study giving [them] our time and attention’, and inviting ‘a material semiotic take on our objects of study, to view them not as singular entities, but as inherently relational objects that have the capacity to shift and change depending on the practices in which they happen to figure’ (M’charek, 2023). Extended to the troublesome, difficult, perhaps even ‘ugly’ object/method/theory of race, such methods require the difficult and circuitous work of tracing relations and presences, as well as attuning oneself to things made absent and histories glossed over.…”