Ordering the Human: Global Science and Racial Reason

Understanding and categorizing racial difference have significant implications for individuals across the globe. Historically, these classifications have been the foundational logics upon which violence is justified and perpetrated. Purportedly “universal” and “stable” racial categories continue to affect health outcomes and resource allocation globally as they are incorporated and reinscribed in scientific and biomedical research. By bringing together an international group of biological and social scientists working on these questions in various national and political contexts, the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society (PRSS) aims to uncover how race as a unit of analysis is defined, operationalized, and reconstituted through scientific and biomedical practices. As the legacies of racial divisions continue to influence and circumscribe lives, this symposium will provide a vital starting point to systematically and synthetically analyze the role of racial science and to strategize possible ways out of the naturalization of racial categories.