Curious about race: Generous methods and modes of knowing in practice.

What is race? And how does it figure in different scientific practices? To answer these questions, I suggest that we need to know race differently. Rather than defining race or looking for one conclusive answer to what it is, I propose methods that are open-ended, that allow us to follow race around, while remaining curious as to what it is. I suggest that we pursue generous methods. Drawing on empirical examples of forensic identification technologies, I argue that the slipperiness of race-the way race and its politics inexorably shift and change-cannot be fully grasped as an 'object multiple'. Race, I show, is not race: The same word refers to different phenomena. To grasp this, I introduce the notion of the affinity concept. Drawing on the history of race, along with contemporary work in forensic genetics, the affinity concept helps us articulate how race indexes three different scientific realities: race as object, race as method, and race as theory. These three different, yet interconnected realities, contribute to race's slipperiness as well as its virulence.

The politics of face and the trouble with race: Exploring relations at the interface between the individual and the collective in forensic practice.

This special issue interrogates race through the lens of face. Its central faces are those in forensic settings. Promising immediate legibility and access to the individual suspect, forensic faces nevertheless mobilize a variety of collectives. We offer conceptual and methodological tools to examine the face as both an individual and a collective phenomenon, and demonstrate through detailed cases how the face thus allows us to address the absent presence of race. Given its long and convoluted history in physical anthropology, as a marker of racial typology, the face forces us to reckon with colonial histories of ordering human difference. But the face also allows us to question a regime of visuality that congeals around the face in Western culture. In this introduction to The Politics of Face and the Trouble with Race we elaborate these concerns and introduce the contributions to this volume.

Tentacular Faces: Race and the Return of the Phenotype in Forensic Identification.

The face, just like DNA, is taken to represent a unique individual. This article proposes to move beyond this representational model and to attend to the work that a face can do. I introduce the concept of tentacularity to capture the multiple works accomplished by the face. Drawing on the example of DNA phenotyping, which is used to produce a composite face of an unknown suspect, I first show that this novel technology does not so much produce the face of an individual suspect but that of a suspect population. Second, I demonstrate how the face draws the interest of diverse publics, who with their gaze flesh out its content and contours; the face engages and yields an affective response. I argue that the biologization of appearance by way of the face contributes to the racialization of populations. [race, phenotype, material-semiotics, facial typologies, forensics genetics, DNA phenotyping].

La cara, justo como el ADN, se toma para representar un individuo único. Este artículo propone ir más allá del modelo representacional y atender al trabajo que una cara puede hacer. Introduzco el concepto de tentacularidad para capturar los trabajos múltiples logrados por la cara. Basada en el ejemplo de fenotipificar el ADN, el cual es usado para producir una cara compuesta de un sospechoso desconocido, primero muestro que esta tecnología novedosa no produce tanto la cara de un sospechoso individual, sino la de una población sospechosa. Segundo, demuestro cómo la cara atrae el interés de públicos diversos, quienes, con su mirada, definen su contenido y contornos; la cara envuelve y produce una respuesta afectiva. Argumento que la biologización de la apariencia por medio de la cara contribuye a la racialización de las poblaciones. [raza, fenotipo, semiótica material, tipologías faciales, genética forense, fenotipificar el ADN].

Silent witness, articulate collective: DNA evidence and the inference of visible traits.

DNA profiling is a well-established technology for use in the criminal justice system, both in courtrooms and elsewhere. The fact that DNA profiles are based on non-coding DNA and do not reveal details about the physical appearance of an individual has contributed to the acceptability of this type of evidence. Its success in criminal investigation, combined with major innovations in the field of genetics, have contributed to a change of role for this type of evidence. Nowadays DNA evidence is not merely about identification, where trace evidence is compared to a sample taken from a suspect. An ever-growing role is anticipated for DNA profiling as an investigative tool, a technique aimed at generating a suspect where there is none. One of these applications is the inference of visible traits. As this article will show, racial classifications are at the heart of this application. The Netherlands and its legal regulation of 'externally visible traits' will serve as an example. It will be shown that, to make this technology work, a large number of actors has to be enrolled and their articulations invited. This indicates that instead of a 'silent witness', a DNA profile should rather be seen as an 'articulate collective'. Based on two cases, I argue that the normativity of visible traits is context-dependent. Taking into account the practices in which technology is put to use alerts us to novel ethical questions raised by their application.

The high-profile case as 'fire object': Following the Marianne Vaatstra murder case through the media.

In 1999 a girl named Marianne Vaatstra was found murdered in a rural area in the Netherlands. In 2012 the perpetrator was arrested. Throughout this period as well as thereafter, the Vaatstra case was never far removed from media attention and public debate. How did this murder become such a high-profile case? In this article we employ the concept of the 'fire object' to examine the high-profileness of the Vaatstra case. Law and Singleton's fire metaphor helps to attend to objects as patterns of presences and absences. In the Vaatstra case it is in particular the unknown suspect that figures as a generative absence that brings to presence different versions of the case and allows them to proliferate. In this article we present four different versions of the Vaatstra case that were presented in the media and which shaped the identities of concerned actors. The unruly topology of fire objects, we argue, might well explain the high-profileness of such criminal cases.