skip to main content
Goldsmiths - University of London
  • Staff & students
  • Search
  • Main menu
 
Main menu

Primary

  • Home
  • Course finder
  • Study with us
  • Departments
  • Research
  • Services for Business
  • For the local community
  • Alumni and friends
  • News
  • Events
  • About us
Staff & students

Staff + students

  • Students
  • Library
  • Timetable
  • Learn.gold - VLE
  • Email - Outlook
  • IT support
  • Staff directory
  • Goldmine - staff intranet
  • Graduate School - PGR students
  • Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre
  • Events admin
In this section

Breadcrumb navigation

  • Events
    • Radical New Cross
    • Degree shows
    • Fixing It
    • Black History Month
  • Calendar
Open social sharing
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Whatsapp
Lecture

Amade M’charek: Race, Face and Forensic Identification


24 Oct 2019, 4:00pm - 6:00pm

PSH LGO2, Professor Stuart Hall Building

Event overview

Cost FREE, no booking required. All welcome!
Department Sociology, Centre for Invention and Social Process
Contact sociology(@gold.ac.uk)

Goldsmiths Sociology Department Annual Lecture with Amade M’charek (Professor of Anthropology of Science, University of Amsterdam)

The face is evident and intricate. In everyday life the face is ubiquitous. Yet in social theory the face is rather absent. In my lecture I want to move beyond the representational model and attend to the work that a face can do, and to what the face is capable of. I introduce the concept of the tentacular to analyze how the face draws certain publics together and how it feeds on that public to assume content and contours. My examples come for the field of forensic genetics, where DNA-phenotyping is used to produce a ‘composite face’ of the unknown individual. I will show that this novel technology is not so much aimed at the individual suspect but at a suspect population, clusters of individuals. I argue that this population is racialized through the biologization of the phenotype.

This process prompts the question: what is race? To answer this, I suggest that we need to ‘care’ for race, i.e., to invent methods that are open-ended and allow us to follow race around and examine how it shifts and changes in practice. I propose the concept of generous methods to show that the slipperiness of race is not simply a matter of ‘multiplicity’; race is not only an ‘object multiple’. As a word and a practice, race is different ontological things altogether. Different realities: race is an object, a tool, and a theory. Three different yet connected realities, contributing to its slipperiness as well as its virulent nature.

Dates & times

Date Time Add to calendar
24 Oct 2019 4:00pm - 6:00pm
  • apple
  • google
  • outlook

Accessibility

If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.

Event controls

  • About us
  • Accessibility statement
  • Contact us
  • Cookie use
  • Find us
  • Copyright and disclaimer
  • Jobs
  • Modern slavery statement
Admin login
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
© Goldsmiths, University of London Back to top