Research network
The project is committed to bringing together people, institutions and learned societies in an attempt to enrich our understandings of both the scientific and public debates related to the concepts of race and ethnicity, and the practices that surround them. Follow the links to learn more about this developing research network:
The colleagues who have contributed with their expertise as advisors for this project are:
- Veronika Lipphardt, is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College Freiburg. She has worked on the history of the life sciences in the 20th century, particularly history of physical anthropology and human population genetics in the political, social and cultural contexts. She has also been the director of the Independent Research Group “Twentieth Century Histories of Knowledge About Human Variation” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
- Gísli Pálsson, who is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland. He has written extensively on a variety of issues, including human-environment relations, slavery, biomedicine, and genomics. He has done anthropological fieldwork in Iceland, the Republic of Cape Verde, the Canadian Arctic, and the Virgin Islands.
- Jenny Reardon is Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has written extensively on the international Human Genome Diversity Project, and is currently investigating the societal and scientific paradoxes, dilemmas and problems created by the focus on human groups as objects of genetic analysis.
- Ricardo Ventura Santos, is an anthropologist affiliated with the National School of Public Health/ Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation/ Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, and holds a faculty position at the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum, both in Rio de Janeiro. He is involved in the project ”Race, genomics and mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America”, which is a comparative analysis of how ideas of race and ethnicity interact with genomic research in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. The project explores how knowledge about genetics reinforces or challenges Latin-American national identities based on racial-cultural mixture between Europeans, Africans and indigenous Americans.
The following institutions are affiliated with the research project:
- The Research Council of Norway funds this project under the programme Cultural Conditions Underlying Social Change (SAMKUL).
- The Norwegian Museum for Science and Technology is responsible for this project.
- The project cooperates with the Institute of Health and Society and the Department of Biosciences at the University of Oslo and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen.
- Our collaboration with The Norwegian National Committees for Research Ethics and The National Committee for Research Ethics on Human Remains provides insights on issues concerning, for example, research on ethnic groups and human remains.
The researchers in this project participate actively in the workings of the following academic societies: