Bones, Genomics, and the Ethics of (In)visibility

Professor Watkin's research at American University, focuses on the biological and social history of African Americans living in the 19th and 20th century urban US. She  began this journey studying the health consequences of poverty and inequality through skeletal and documentary data analysis, with a focus on the W. Montague Cobb skeletal collection. This unique anatomical collection is made up of DC residents who died in the city between 1930 and 1969. There is extensive cultural information associated with the collection that makes it ideal for examining various biocultural interrelationships.

She is currently building on this work with a broader look at how Black bodies are positioned as biological and social products in biological anthropology – as researchers and subjects. A key area of concern is the continued dearth of POC and other minority researchers in the field despite robust critiques of scientific racism. This suggests the need for a closer examination of social relations in our field, for which Black feminist theory and critiques of science are an underutilized resource. She uses the work of scholars such as Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers to analyze the ways that scientific practices can move toward methodological and theoretical innovation - while maintaining epistemological underpinnings that render ideal physical and intellectual humanity as white, male, cisgendered and heterosexual. Therefore, scientific practices continue to structurally support the marginalization of scholarship produced by people who are not a part of racial, gendered, sexual, class and physical majorities. This in turn normalizes their place as subjects in the research process, versus knowledge producers.