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Biography
Alondra Nelson is Associate Professor of Sociology and holds
an appointment in the Institute
for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG). Her areas of specialization
include race and ethnicity in the U.S.; gender and kinship; socio-historical
studies of medicine, science and technology; and social and cultural theory. Nelson studies the
production of knowledge about human difference in biomedicine and technoscience
and the circulation of these ideas in the public sphere: Her research focuses
on how science and its applications shape the social
world, including aspects of personal identification, racial formation and
collective action. In turn, she also explores the ways in which social groups challenge,
engage and, in some instances, adopt and mobilize conceptualizations of race,
ethnicity and gender derived from scientific and technical domains.
Professor Nelson is author of Body and
Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Health and Race (forthcoming,
University of California Press), the first book-length exploration of the
radical organization’s health-focused activities that included the formation of
a network of neighborhood clinics, the implementation of genetic screening
programs, and intervention into debates over the medicialization of violence,
among other initiatives. Through its activism, she argues, the Black Panther
Party advanced a “social health” frame—a distinctive, expansive conceptualization
of well-being that articulated biological wellness with both economic justice
and racial equality and that understood the health of individuals and
communities as inextricably linked to that of U.S. society, more generally. Body and Soul reveals that the Black
Panthers’ initiatives were in keeping with a longer tradition of African
American health advocacy; were in step with the women’s and radical health social
movements of the 1970s; and, in highlighting the racialized nature of health
disparities, the importance of community health workers and links between
disease status and identity, would anticipate contemporary issues.
Nelson’s current project, entitled Reconciliation Projects: Slavery, Memory and the Social Life of DNA,traces how claims about race and ancestry
are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures, including
family genealogy and ancestry, reparations politics and the formation of public
and collective memory. She takes up these themes in two recent publications
that are among the earliest empirical scholarly investigations of the effects and
implications of direct-to-consumer genetic testing: “Bio Science: Genetic
Ancestry Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry” (in the journal Social
Studies of Science) and “The Factness of Diaspora” (in the edited volume Revisiting Race in a Genomics Age).
She
is also co-editor (with Keith Wailoo, Mia Bay
and Catherine Lee) of a forthcoming collection of essays that will consider how
genetic analysis is employed to settle historical disputes and controversies. With Thuy Linh Tu, Nelson
edited Technicolor:
Race, Technology and Everyday Life (New York University Press, 2001). Her
publications also include essays and articles on race and digital culture;
“scientism” in Black Power politics; and the use of racial categories in
medicine. As well, her writing and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington
Post, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher
Education and The Guardian (London), among other
publications.
Prior to joining the Columbia
faculty in July 2009, Nelson taught in the departments of sociology and African
American studies at Yale
University, where she was
recipient of the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching. Her
research has been supported by the Ford, Woodrow Wilson and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations.
She has been a visiting scholar at BIOS: Centre for the Study of Bioscience,
Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics, the International Center
for Advanced Studies at New York University and the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie in Munich, Germany.
Nelson received her Ph.D. from New
York University
in 2003.
Selected Publications
(forthcoming). Body
and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Health and Race. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Clarke, Adele E., Janet Shim, Sara Shostak and Alondra
Nelson (2009). ‘Biomedicalizing Genetic Health, Diseases and
Identities,’ in Paul Atkinson, Peter Glasner, and Margaret Lock (eds.), Handbook of Genetics and Society: Mapping
the New Genomic Era. London:
Routledge.
(2009). ‘The
Inclusion-and-Difference Paradox: A
Review of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research by Steven
Epstein,’ Social Identities 15: 741-43.
(2008). ‘Bio Science:
Genetic Ancestry Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry,’ Social
Studies of Science 38: 759-783.
(2008). ‘The Factness of Diaspora’, in Barbara Koenig,
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson (eds.)
Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age.
New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Bolnick, Deborah, Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, Richard
Cooper, Joan H. Fujimura, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Jonathan Marks, Ann
Morning, Alondra Nelson, et al. (2007). ‘The Business
and Science of Ancestry Testing,’ Science 318 (5849): 399-400.
Braun, Lundy, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Duana Fullwiley, Evelynn
Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, et al. (2007). ‘Racial
categories in medical practice: How useful are they?’ Public Library of
Science (PLoS): Medicine 4(9): 1423-1428.
(2006). ‘A Black Mass as Black Gothic: Myth and Medicine in
African American Cultural Nationalism,’ in Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Crawford
(eds.) New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement.
New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Editor. (2002) Afrofuturism-A
Special Issue of Social Text 71 (Durham: Duke University
Press).
Editor. (with Thuy Linh N. Tu) (2001). Technicolor:
Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. (New York:
New York University Press).
Current CV
photo credit: Aaron Dill
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