Based on an ethnographic study of fingerprint and DNA evidence practices in the Swedish judicial system, this article analyses the materialization of forensic evidence. It argues that forensic evidence, while popularly understood as firmly rooted in materiality, is inseparably technoscientific and cultural. Its roots in the material world are entangled threads of matter, technoscience and culture that produce particular bodily constellations within and together with a particular sociocultural context. Forensic evidence, it argues further, is co-materialized with crimes as well as (...) with particular bodily and social constellations. Consequently, the article suggests that an analysis of how forensic evidence is produced can contribute to feminist understandings of the inseparability of sex and gender: understanding bodies as ongoing technoscientific-material-cultural practices of materialization may be a fruitful approach to analysing their complexity, and the relationships in which they are placed, without surrendering to either cultural or biological determinism. Taking a theoretical point of departure not only in an STS-informed approach, but also in material feminist theorizations, the article also underlines that the suggested theoretical conversations across borders of feminist theory and STS should be understood as a two-way-communication where the two fields contribute mutually to each other. (shrink)

A number of public controversies have emerged around forensic DNA testing backlogs at crime laboratories in the United States. This study provides a first look at public responses to such backlogs, using a controversy in the state of Wisconsin as a case study. First, it builds on research about public understandings of DNA and the “CSI effect” to develop a theoretical framework. Next, it explores news coverage of the Wisconsin backlog. It then uses survey data to show that public understandings (...) of DNA, media use, and demographic factors were related to how closely respondents followed the story about the backlog and/or how much they supported increased spending on DNA testing at the crime lab. Self-reported understanding of DNA predicted following the backlog, whereas perceived reliability of DNA evidence predicted both following the backlog and support. Total television viewing was not related to either following the backlog or support, but watching crime television predicted following the backlog. Reading a newspaper and watching local TV news each predicted following the backlog; reading a newspaper also predicted support. These results suggest a number of theoretical insights into how members of the public may reason about and draw on media messages regarding DNA and DNA testing in responding to forensic DNA testing backlogs. (shrink)

"Who knows how much longer it will be, but others have crossed over to the US, and have found a job, and have even sent for their families. I am not the only one crossing, I am number 57 out of 72, but we do not walk together, all 72—that would call too much attention to us. We walk at a good pace, each one with their thoughts, we walk from sun to sun without stopping almost; others have done it." (...) These are the words of renowned writer Elena Poniatowska on 72migrantes.com, a virtual altar honoring the 72 migrants massacred in a ranch in San Fernando, a municipality in the border state of Tamaulipas, Mexico, in August 2010. Attempting to recreate the thoughts of unidentified victim number 57 on his trek towards the... (shrink)

The public’s understanding of forensic DNA databases remains undertheorized and few empirical studies have been produced. This article aims to address this omission by exploring the answers to an open-ended question taken from an online questionnaire regarding the reasons for individuals’ voluntarily accepting or refusing to allow their DNA profile to be included in the Portuguese forensic DNA database. The analysis is undertaken from the perspective of biological citizenship and the simultaneous empowering and disempowering effects of surveillance. The results indicate (...) a pragmatic ethical framework that is linked to the cultural and emotional elements of altruism, resistance, stigma, and social representations of what is beneficial or harmful to the individual and to society. These subjectivities are anchored in commonplace images and metaphors for genetics, DNA, and forensic science that circulate in the messages transmitted by the media which pervade everyday life; hierarchies of trust in science and the justice system; and moral categories associated with the individual self-judgment in relation to crime, surveillance, and social order. (shrink)

The capacity of contemporary forensic genetics has rendered “race” into an interesting tool to produce clues about the identity of an unknown suspect. Whereas the conventional use of DNA profiling was primarily aimed at the individual suspect, more recently a shift of interest in forensic genetics has taken place, in which the population and the family to whom an unknown suspect allegedly belongs, has moved center stage. Making inferences about the phenotype or the family relations of this unknown suspect produces (...) suspect populations and families. We discuss the criminal investigation following the Marianne Vaatstra murder case in the Netherlands and the use of forensic technologies therein. It is in many ways an interesting case, but in this paper, we focus on how race surfaced in science and society. We show that race materializes neither in the technologies used nor in the bodies at stake. Rather, race emerges through a material semiotic relation that surfaces in the translation that occurs as humans and things move across sites. We argue that race is enacted, firstly, in the context of legislation as biology reduced to bodily characteristics; secondly, in the forensic analyses as patterns of absent presence; and, thirdly, in society as a process of phenotypic othering. (shrink)