Social and Behavioral Sciences Dean’s Distinguished Lectures

Hansen's talk draws from her forthcoming book Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America. Whiteout deploys ethnographic and historical analysis of pharmaceutical manufacturers, regulators, neuroscientists and addiction physicians to track technologies of whiteness in neuroscience, pharmaceutical development, regulation and marketing that stem from drug policies that date back over a century. Based on a decade of participant observation, interviews and archival research, Whiteout updates theories of racial capitalism to reveal how biotechnological industries are driven by white consumption rather than black labor.

Human skin pigmentation is the production of evolution, and is related to the strength of ultraviolet radiation in the places where ancient humans and modern people have lived. In recent human history, skin color has been the primary physical criterion by which people have been classified into groups in the Western scientific tradition. Color-based race labels have mostly not been neutral descriptors of the trait, but have connoted meanings that influenced the perceptions of described groups. The mental constructs and stereotypes of color-based races have been durable, despite laws and education. In this lecture, Dr. Jablonski will explore how knowledge of the evolution of skin color and of the historical development of color-based race concepts can usefully inform education and society.

Hannah Landecker uses the tools of history and social science to study contemporary developments in the life sciences, and their historical taproots in the twentieth century. She is currently working on a book called “American Metabolism,” which looks at transformations to the metabolic sciences wrought by the rise of epigenetics, microbiomics, cell signaling and hormone biology.

Abstract: Professor Landecker will present ethnographic observations from spaces of contemporary biomedical science where the relationships between industrialization, work, energy, food, and metabolic disorder are being actively rethought and redrawn. She argues that the contours of a postindustrial metabolism are coming into view, in which concerns about asynchrony, dysbiology, instability, and regulatory crisis displace the traditional concerns of labor, fatigue, caloric energy, and production.

Athena Aktipis (BA Reed College, PhD University of Pennsylvania) is a cooperation theorist, theoretical evolutionary biologist, and cancer biologist, working at the intersection of these fields. Dr. Aktipis is the author of the forthcoming book Princeton University Press "Evolution in the flesh: Cancer and the transformation of life.

Professor de León directs the Michigan Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a long-term study of clandestine migration between Mexico and the United States that uses a combination of ethnographic, visual, archaeological, and forensic approaches. His book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (UC Press, 2015) won the 2016 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology.