Duana Fullwiley
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of Medical Anthropology
Address:
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617 496-4987
Fax: 617 496-2871
Email: dfullwil@fas.harvard.edu
Courses
African and African American Studies 97: Sophomore Tutorial: Race and Humanism
Various graduate courses with other members of the Department
Biography
Topical Interests: Anthropology of Science, Medical Anthropology, Race, Global Health, Technology and Identity, Genetics and Society, particularly in French-speaking Africa, France, and the United States.
Professor Fullwiley earned her Ph.D from the joint program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco in December of 2002. Currently she is completing a book entitled The Enculturated Gene: Making Sense of Sickle cell Difference in Modern Africa. For this project Dr. Fullwiley explores how local practices of ensuring health actively inform genetic renderings of sickle cell anemia in contemporary Senegal . She brings together notions of ecology and economy to probe how global understandings in genetic medicine that have classed “Senegalese” sickle cell as “mild” are the partial result of economic privations in West Africa and local-global health priorities. This work also chronicles North-South genetic research relations and their effects on scientific and lay perceptions of disease and embodiment.
Professor Fullwiley's second, and ongoing, project focuses on recent movements in American genome sciences that aim to tailor pharmaceuticals to individual and group genetic profiles (pharmacogenomics). Through fieldwork in U.S. genomics laboratories, and other related sites, this project explores how rationales of “tailored medicine” have created new grounds for genetic uses and understandings of race. Professor Fullwiley has published several articles that explore new intersections of race, genetics and U.S. racialized health disparities. The most noteworthy of these are “The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Racial Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice” which appeared in the journal Science as Culture (2007), and “Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship,” which appeared in the journal Biosocieties (2007).
As of March 2006, Dr. Fullwiley has begun new research on sickle cell trait suffering in Senegal. Through ethnography, as well as biomedical assays, this work explores the links between ecology, biology, affect and economy. Her articles and book chapters that precede this work, and that situate its ethnographic and historical context, include “Biosocial Suffering: Order and Illness in Urban West Africa,” which appeared in the journal Biosocieties (2006), and an edited volume chapter in French entitled “Contingences de la maladie: les politiques culturelles de la souffrance en regard du trait drépanocytaire AS au Sénégal," which appeared in La drépanocytose: Regards croisés sur une maladie orpheline (Karthala 2004).
Professor Fullwiley's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew and Florence White Fellows program in Medicine and the Humanities at the UC Irvine Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She has been an invited scholar at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (1997-1998, 2000 and 2002) in Paris and has held a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at New York University in the Department of Anthropology. She has also been a USIA Fulbright Scholar to Senegal, a fellow at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2004-2005), and has recently completed her tenure as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health (2005-2007).
For further information on Prof. Fullwiley's research, please use this link.
Publications
2008
"The Biologistical Construction of Race: 'Admixture' Technology and the New Genetic Medicine." Social Studies of Science 38(5): 695-735.
2007
"The Science and Business of Ancestry Testing," Science 318 (5849): 399-400; co-authored: Deborah A. Bolnick, Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, Richard S. Cooper, Joan H. Fujimura, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Jonathan Marks, Ann Morning, Alondra Nelson, Pilar Ossorio, Jenny Reardon, Susan M. Reverby, Kimberly TallBear.
2007
"Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship."
Solicited manuscript. BioSocieties 2(2):221-237.
2007
"The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Racial Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice." Science as Culture 16(1):1-30.
2007
"Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?" PLoS Medicine 4(9): 1423-1428 (e271); co-authored: Lundy Braun, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Duana Fullwiley, Evelynn M Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, William Quivers, Susan M Reverby, and Alexandra E Shields
2006
"Biosocial Suffering: Order and Illness in Urban West Africa." BioSocieties 1(4): 421-438.
2004
"From Discriminate Biopower to Everyday Biopolitics: Views on Sickle cell Testing in Dakar." Medical Anthropology 23(2):157-194.
2004
"Contingences de la maladie: les politiques culturelles de la souffrance en regard du trait drépanocytaire AS au Senegal. (Contingencies of illness: the cultural politics of sickle cell trait suffering in Senegal)" in Agnès Lainé (ed.) La drépanocytose: Regards croisés sur une maladie orpheline. (Paris: Karthala).
1998
"Race, biologie et maladie: la difficile organisation des patients atteints de drépanocytose aux Etats-Unis. (Race, Biology, and Illness: Barriers to Sickle Cell Patient Group Organization in the United States)." Sciences Sociales et Santé 16(3): 129-157.