**This event is open to those of the Stanford community ONLY**
❗️There will also be lunch with the speaker on Monday, October 19th @12:30pm in room 51A❗️
In 2015, South Africa implemented a law that established a national forensic DNA database. The goal of the database is to match DNA profiles produced from the saliva, blood, and other bodily traces found at crime scenes with those of criminal suspects, but the result has also been to limit ideas of postapartheid justice to carceral containment. Based on ethnographic research conducted among South African Police Service’s forensic science division between 2017 and 2024, this paper interrogates the role of suspicion in building South Africa’s national forensic DNA database. Police at every stage of the DNA database-building process, from detectives to crime scene analysts to forensic scientists to database architects and workers, manage their work by managing suspicion. Suspicion here is therefore a question, not a defined term for which we already know the contours, the cultures, the immediate outcomes, or the spiraling implications. Guided by ethnographic work with variously positioned police officers in South Africa, I ask how they manage and build from suspicion: not only their suspicion of potential criminal suspects, but of one another, of the role of evidence in managing uncertainty, and of and from the communities they aim to serve. This talk emerges from a book manuscript in progress, The Forensic Fix: Justice in Broken Worlds. The book project asks how carceral imaginaries take hold and materialize through the labor that transforms genetic data into carceral evidence and people into criminalized populations, ultimately arguing that to understand and challenge this growing carceral network, we need to know how it gets built in practice. Research for this project was funded by the National Science Foundation, The Wenner Gren Foundation, The Ohio State University’s Center for Criminal Justice Research, and Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and Center for Social Sciences.
