The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation

Project Title- Juridical Genetics: Building Postcolonial Carceral Futures

Bio:

Noah Tamarkin is an associate professor of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies. His book Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa (Duke University Press in 2020) received the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Prize in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore from the Association for Jewish Studies and the 2022 honorable mention for the Diana Forsythe Prize from the American Anthropological Association's Committee for the Anthropology of Science Technology and Computing, Society for the Anthropology of Work, and General Anthropology Division. It ethnographically examines the politics of race, religion, and recognition among Lemba people, Black South Africans who were part of Jewish genetic ancestry studies in the 1980s and 1990s. His current ethnographic research examines the introduction and implementation of South Africa’s national forensic DNA database, the forensic genetics networks that it has fostered, and its implications for postapartheid South African and global politics of surveillance statecraft, human rights, and carcerality. His next project considers trans health as experimental practice through which bodies and expertise are reconfigured. At Cornell, he teaches courses that explore race and religion; borders and belonging; policing, carcerality and abolition; biology and society; and the temporalities of genetics. He is also a research associate at University of Witwatersrand’s Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg, South Africa.