"The Molecularization of Identity: Science, Metaphors, and Personhood in the 21st Century" (Co-sponsored with Harvard Kennedy School)

Date: 

Fri - Sat, Apr 29 to Apr 30, 9:00am - 3:30pm

Location: 

Harvard Kennedy School

A two-day interdisciplinary symposium co-sponsored by the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Schedule and details here.

Organizers: Ian V. McGonigle (Harvard) and Ruha Benjamin (Princeton)

Advances in genetic technologies, digital mediation, and regimes of surveillance have ushered in a new age of identity. The limits of public/private, visible/invisible, natural/synthetic, local/global, and other modern notions of identity, have been reconfigured. Moreover, the ways in which people are governed, and how citizenship is imagined, have also changed. This historical moment thus demands a rethinking of the ways identities are made. With the tools and expertise from multiple disciplines, this symposium specifically interrogates the ways in which human identities, particularly ethnic and racial identities, have been articulated in the molecular realm, in the neoliberal age (both literally and metaphorically), and likewise, how states and citizens have been entangled in these developments.