STS-affiliated Faculty Duana Fullwiley Wins 2024 Diana Forsythe Prize
The Diana Forsythe Prize, established in 1998, honors the best book or series of published articles that reflect the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. The prize is awarded annually at the AAA meeting by a committee consisting of one representative from the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) and two from CASTAC. It is supported by the General Anthropology Division (GAD) and Bern Shen.
The 2024 prize is awarded to STS-affiliated faculty member Dr. Duana Fullwiley for her book Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (University of California Press, 2024). This brilliant and brave book, based on two decades of deep ethnographic engagement with genome scientists, powerfully demonstrates the stakes of twenty-first century genetic diversity research and the racialized histories that animate it. Fullwiley shows how biological race is a powerful fiction that shows up in social interactions, in corporate investments, and in research funding, despite long established confirmation within genetics that race doesn’t exist as such. Further, her attention to racialized genomics workers, from prominent academics and lab directors to entry-level technicians and students, provides nuanced texture for understanding the promises and disappointments of pursuing race and gender equity through genomic science. As it follows everyday negotiations with the politics of “inclusion,” Tabula Raza beautifully exemplifies the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, technology, and biomedicine.
Diana Forsythe was a pioneering anthropologist of artificial intelligence, and an important figure in the STS community. She died tragically at 50 in 1997. Diana was the daughter of George and Alexandra Forsythe, two of the founders of Stanford’s computer science department. A collection of her work was published posthumously as Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence (Stanford University Press, 2002).