Abstract
Efforts to rationalize racial injustice and colonialism by appealing to the epistemic authority of science — race science — have waxed and waned over the last several decades. Even when it is regarded as discredited or pseudoscientific, race science has been actively maintained on the fringes of mainstream scientific communities, and practitioners have shown remarkable ingenuity in appropriating cutting-edge research methods and organizational forms, including behavioral genetics in the 1960s, genomics in the 2000s, and open access publishing in the 2010s. This interdisciplinary symposium will apply techniques from across the history, philosophy, and social studies of science to offer critiques of the claims, methods, and organization of race science. The first two talks discuss race science in the second half of the twentieth century, from computational social science (Lobato and Hicks) and historical (Jackson) perspectives. The second two talks use more typical philosophy of science approaches, examining the appropriation of population biology by the “human biodiversity” movement (Diamond-Hunter) and the scientific standing of race science (Smith).
