Biomolecular Humanities Workshop, November: Sarah Abel

In this workshop we will be talking with Sarah Abel. The event will consist: short introduction, short outline from Sarah, Q&A with Sarah, Ester Oras, Jerome de Groot, questions from the floor.

Sarah Abel is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and author of Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body after the Genome (2021, University of North Carolina Press). Her work focuses on contemporary racisms and antiracisms at the interface between scientific knowledge production and social uses of genomic, visual, and digital technologies and, broadly, she aims to understand how emerging technologies stand to reproduce structures of oppression, and to propose how they could instead contribute to global struggles for social justice. Sarah was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie doctoral fellow of the EUROTAST project “Exploring the History, Archaeology, and New Genetics of the Transatlantic Slave Trade”, funded by the European Research Council (2012–15), and a cofounder and postdoctoral researcher of the CitiGen project “Identity, Citizenship and Nationhood in the Post-Genome Era”, funded by Humanities in the European Research Area (2016-19). Between 2019–24 she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge for her project on representations of skin colour in the visual arts and social sciences in Mexico. Her current research at the UNAM focuses on the ethics of AI text-to-image generators and their potential to amplify forms of epistemic oppression in Latin American societies.