The Afterlives of Skulls: How Race Science Became a Data Science

Iris Clever presents “The Afterlives of Skulls: How Race Science Became a Data Science.” In this talk, I make visible how measuring skulls for the purpose of studying race, often assumed to be an outdated scientific practice, in fact remained at the forefront of science and technology in the twentieth century. I show how skull collecting was transformed into a data-intensive science and trace a shift in the production of racial classifications from the anthropologist’s hands and eyes to seemingly disembodied technologies. The talk will also show how historical skull collections lead significant afterlives in present-day society by discussing how they are incorporated into software widely used in forensics.