"No Really, What Percentage Are You?"
Explore the promises and the problems of Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing services, under the broader umbrella of racial justice and genomics.
DTC genetic testing services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com are rapidly becoming a cultural touchstone, a mainstream phenomenon with significant implications for common notions of race and ethnicity, personal and social identity.
Dive into questions arising within this new landscape of public genomics: How are people integrating genealogical knowledge (such as of their family tree) with new forms of DNA-based ancestry testing? What is the relationship between our genetic makeup and our racial and ethnic identities (and the ways we are racially classified)? What kinds of genetic ‘truths’ are being produced by these forms of commercialized science? Further, who owns, and has access to, our genetic data? What kinds of organizations are using our data, and for what purposes?
Free and open to the public; refreshments provided; no registration needed
Meet Your Host
The Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz is a globally unique endeavor that innovates experimental spaces, engages in co-laborative research practices, and fosters emerging alliances between seemingly disparate sectors, disciplines and communities. Biomedical innovation, species extinction, toxic ecologies, healthcare reform, and many other contemporary matters of concern provoke questions that traverse multiple intellectual, institutional and ethico-political worlds. Science & Justice generates modes of inquiry and empirically rigorous research that address these enormous challenges and support livable worlds. The Center is home to the Science and Justice Working Group, graduate training programs and sponsored research projects. The initiative builds on the UCSC campus’ historic commitments to socioecological justice and strengths in science studies and interdisciplinary research.
Participants:
Chessa Adsit-Morris, UC Santa Cruz Graduate Student of History of Art & Visual Culture
Russ Corbett-Detig, UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering
James Doucet-Battle, UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Sociology
Ed Green, UC Santa Cruz Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering
Chris Hables Gray, Lecturer, UC Santa Cruz Crown College
Braden Larson, UC Santa Cruz Graduate Student of Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology
Paloma Medina, UC Santa Cruz Graduate Student of Biomolecular Engineering, Science & Justice Fellow
Co-Sponsored by
The UC Santa Cruz Science & Justice Research Center, the School of Engineering NIH Training Grant, College Nine Student Senate, the departments of Biomolecular Engineering, Education, and the Genomics Institute Office of Diversity, Oakes College Senate, and the Stuart Lab.
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