Join the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics for this research talk:

“Caste in Translation? Community, Genotyping, and Risk in Postgenomic India and Its Diasporas”

Arafaat Valiani, Wayne Morse Resident Scholar and Associate Professor of History
Commentary by Vera Keller, Associate Professor of History

Friday, April 16, 2021
10:00 a.m. PST
https://uoregon.zoom.us/j/97518684466

This talk explores one of several recent initiatives in genomics which seek to produce genetic maps of caste-based communities among populations in South Asia and its diasporas. It reviews scholarly publications about these initiatives, along with reports in the media, in order to trace how principal investigators and public commentators construct an epistemology of comparison and difference in the context of the genotyping of caste among South Asians.

Arafaat Valiani is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. His current research focuses on biomedicine/biotechnology and population genetics in South Asia and among Asian populations in North America, employing methods from medical sociology, indigenous science and technology studies, and South Asian Studies. Valiani’s first book, Militant Publics in India: Physical Culture and Violence in the Making of a Modern Polity (Palgrave 2011), combined history and ethnography to examine the effects of ethno-religious, medical, and masculine conceptions of the body on the formation of political community in modern India.

Additional Zoom meeting info:

Meeting ID: 975 1868 4466
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