School of Humanities and Sciences
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Duana Fullwiley
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioI am an anthropologist of science and medicine interested in how social identities, health outcomes, and molecular genetic findings increasingly intersect. In my first book, The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton, 2011), I draw on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the US, France and Senegal. By bringing the lives of people with sickle cell anemia together with how the science about them has been made, The Enculturated Gene weaves together postcolonial genetic science, the effects of structural adjustment on health resources, and patient activism between Senegal and France to show how African sickle cell has been ordered in ethnic-national terms at the level of the gene. The Enculturated Gene won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2011 Amaury Talbot Prize for the most valuable work of African Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association’s 2014 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology.
Since 2003, I have conducted multi-sited field research in the United States on emergent technologies that measure human genetic diversity among populations and between individuals. As an outgrowth of this research, I have become particularly interested in how scientists engage ideas of genetic "inclusion" in how they enlist participant involvement in specific disease research problems, and how they also grapple with social movements, historical reckoning, data privacy and racial capital. My second book, Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (UC Press, 2024), explores these issues in light of how U.S. political concepts of “race” function in genetic recruitment protocols and study designs on complex disease, “tailored medicine,” ancestry tracing, and personal genomics. Tabula Raza won the 2024 Diana Forsythe Prize granted by the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing of the American Anthropological Association.
As of 2019, I have started new fieldwork on migration from West Africa into Europe. I am concerned with people's personal narratives of success at all costs in light of state sponsored surveillance, the simultaneous rigidity and fluidity of borders (land and sea) aided by new technologies, as well as how people draw from and create various forms of science and knowledge to forge relational trajectories that come to constitute home. This work also interrogates how human-made environmental resource scarcity pushes people to migrate or, rather, to simply move, in their quests for viable futures. This project furthermore investigates new forms of racism engendered by the newest iterations of technologically-assisted and animated border patrolling as the ocean itself is being reconceptualized as a new frontier for salvatory tech options and economic growth in Africa and elsewhere.
My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew and Florence White Fellows program in Medicine and the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I have also been an invited scholar at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation in Paris (1997-1998, 2000 and 2002), a USIA Fulbright Scholar to Senegal, a fellow at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2004-2005), and a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health (2005-2007). My work was selected for a Scholars Award by NSF's Science & Society Program, co-sponsored by the Directorate of Biology, from 2008-2012. -
Gabrielle Hecht
Professor of History
BioGabrielle Hecht is Professor of History and (by courtesy) of Anthropology. She is President of the Society for the History of Technology, and Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa.
Hecht's current research explores the inside-out Earth and its wastes in order to reveal the hidden costs of the so-called "energy transition," with research sites in the Arctic, the Andes, southern Africa, and west Africa. Her 2023 book, *Residual Governance: How South African Foretells Planetary Futures,* received two 2024 PROSE Awards (for Excellence in Social Science and for Government and Politics) from the Association of American Publishers; it's a finalist for the 2024 Best Book Award from the African Studies Association.
Hecht's graduate courses include colloquia on "Power in the Anthropocene," "Infrastructure and Power in the Global South," "Technopolitics," and "Materiality and Power." She supervises dissertations in science and technology studies (STS), transnational history, and African studies. Her undergraduate course in "Racial Justice in the Nuclear Age" was built in partnership with the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates (BVHPCA).
Hecht’s 2012 book *Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade* offers new perspectives on the global nuclear order by focusing on African uranium mines and miners. It received awards from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the American Historical Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Institute, as well as an honorable mention from the African Studies Association. An abridged version appeared in French as *Uranium Africain, une histoire globale* (Le Seuil 2016). Her first book, *The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity* (1998/ 2nd ed 2009), explores how the French embedded nuclear policy in reactor technology, and nuclear culture in reactor operations. It received awards from the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology, and has appeared in French as *Le rayonnement de la France: Énergie nucléaire et identité nationale après la seconde guerre mondiale* (2004/ 2014).
Her affiliations at Stanford include the Center for African Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, the Center for Global Ethnography, the Program on Urban Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. Before returning to Stanford in 2017, Hecht taught in the University of Michigan’s History department for 18 years, where she helped to found and direct UM’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and served as associate director of UM’s African Studies Center.
Hecht holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1992), and a bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT (1986). She’s been a visiting scholar in universities in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the South African and Dutch national research foundations, among others.