Doing the individual and the collective in forensic genetics: governance, race and restitution
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Doing the individual and the collective in forensic genetics: governance, race and restitution Amade M’charek1 · Peter Wade2
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Forensic DNA practice is about identification, about establishing the identity of an individual, usually a suspect, a perpetrator or a victim. Yet in order to establish this identity, the individual has to be placed in the context of a population. The contributions in this special issue zoom in on this relation between the individual and the population. Our aim is to attend closely to the kind of work that forensic genetics is made to do; the kind of (legal, political, societal) infrastructures necessary for that work; and the ways it necessarily orders social relations, producing effects of proximity and distance between collectives, while apparently dealing only with the individual. Race—as a particular and highly charged kind of collective category—is a central concern in this special issue, and focusing on the tension between the individual and the collective helps us to broaden its scope and view the different kinds of politics at stake when it becomes entwined in the work of forensic technologies. In this introduction to the special issue ‘Doing the Individual and the Collective in Forensic Genetics: Governance, Race and Restitution’ we will first elaborate the relation between the individual and the population in the context of forensic genetics, and address how ‘the population’ changed from being a problem for DNA evidence in the early nineties to become a category of value for present-day applications. We will explicate the ways in which the valuing of population comes with a resurgence of race through the controversial UK case of the Night Stalker. We will then address other collectives that are valued and mobilised in forensic genetic research, arguing that this is part and parcel of forensic DNA being not solely an identification tool but also increasingly a tool to generate leads during the criminal investigation. Finally, as forensic genetic methods and technologies have nowadays * Amade M’charek [email protected] 1
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
Vol.:(0123456789)
A. M’charek, P. Wade
travelled to disparate fields, we will briefly address their role in migration and border management regimes and the dual processes of control of migrants and restitution through family reunification.
Population: from a problem to a category of value As much as it has become a self-evident and a routine practice, forensic DNA has had a turbulent history. When Sir Alec Jeffreys introduced this technology in a family reunion case concerning a Ghanaian family in the UK, its potential for the criminal justice system immediately became clear (Jeffreys et al. 1985). If a DNA profile could help to establish a link between an individual and other members of his family (as was the case for the Ghanaian family), might it also work for the forensic identific
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