Narrating ethnicity and diversity in Middle Eastern national genome projects

Indigenous DNA as a metaphor: Nation-building and scientific debates on the rediscovery of Taiwanese ancestry

In this paper, I investigate the co-production of genetic research and national politics in post-martial law Taiwan. This entails analyzing two co-produced phenomena: the nationalization of biomedicine-in which the national discourse over racial/ethnic categories and ancestral origin increasingly shapes scientists' biomedical research; and the biomedicalization of the nation-in which people in public discourse increasingly use biomedical categories in characterizing national differences and identities. I analyze how the production and representation of scientific knowledge of the ancestral origins and genetic make-up of Taiwan have been embedded in Taiwanese politics. This includes the emergence of a new categorization into four great ethnic groups, multiculturalism, and the assertion of a distinct Taiwanese national identity, particularly in response to the People's Republic of China's claims of common ancestry. I also examine how the scientific findings produced in the lab have spilled out into both Taiwan and China through journals, media, history textbooks, and public disputes since the 1990s and brought about significant social impact.

Enhanced source memory for cheaters with higher resemblance to own-culture typical faces

Recent evidence suggests that culture-specific face typicality has an impact on making trait judgments. Additionally, facial resemblance to one's culture-typical faces causes them to be perceived as reliable, less dangerous, and more accurately recognized. When judging persons from other cultural origins, one's own culture's face standards might shape inferences, behavior, and memory. In this study, the partners' facial resemblance to participants' culturally typical faces was manipulated using target faces, considered to be higher or lower, similar to people living in the participants' hometown. Participants were asked to invest in a company together with partners who have a higher and lower resemblance to their own-culture typical faces in a cooperation game. The results showed that facial resemblance to own-culture typical faces affected investment preferences. Partners with a higher resemblance to own-culture typical faces were more correctly distinguished in the old-new recognition memory task. The study found that partners with a higher resemblance to own-culture typical faces had a source memory advantage for cheating behaviors. These results confirmed that a higher resemblance to own-culture typical faces provide an advantage in cross-cultural interactions, allowing them to become better recognized. Additionally, enhanced source memory for cheaters with higher resemblance to own-culture typical faces may indicate a flexible cognitive system that is sensitive to information that violates social expectations.

Mapping ‘bio geo-body’ of Southeast Asia: strategic differentiation and identification of ethnic identity in Vietnam and Singapore

This research explores how data from population genome projects in Southeast Asia are mobilized for identity formation beyond the lab. We compare two cases, the Vietnamese Genome Project which is funded by a Vietnamese private conglomerate and the Peranakan Genome Project in Singapore, to elucidate how the results from population genomic projects in Vietnam and Singapore are co-constituted with existing political and cultural narratives, as well as with varying notions of ‘Chinese-ness’. We find that while scientists in Vietnam use genomics to construct the Vietnamese as genetically independent from what is perceived to be an increasingly dominant Chinese geopolitical power, scientists and participants involved in the Peranakan Genome Project emphasize genomic and cultural mixing which happened between Southern Chinese migrants and the indigenous Malay population historically to distinguish from the rest of the ‘Chinese’ population in Singapore. The cases illustrate the different ways in which the actors involved in these two genome projects strategically differentiate and negotiate the ‘bio geo-body’ of the Vietnamese and the Peranakan in relation to the Chinese identity and nationalism, thereby revealing how genomics is intertwined with local and regional histories, culture and politics.

Impossible, unknowable, accountable: Dramas and dilemmas of data law

On May 25, 2018, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force. EU citizens are granted more control over personal data while companies and organizations are charged with increased responsibility enshrined in broad principles like transparency and accountability. Given the scope of the regulation, which aims to harmonize data practices across 28 member states with different concerns about data collection, the GDPR has significant consequences for individuals in the EU and globally. While the GDPR is primarily intended to regulate tech companies, it also has important implications for data use in scientific research. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with researchers, lawyers and legal scholars in Sweden, I argue that the GDPR's flexible accountability principle effectively encourages researchers to reflect on their ethical responsibility but can also become a source of anxiety and produce unexpected results. Many researchers I spoke with expressed profound uncertainty about 'impossible' legal requirements for research data use. Despite the availability of legal texts and interpretations, I suggest we should take researchers' concerns about 'unknowable' data law seriously. Many researchers' sense of legal ambiguity led them to rethink their data practices and themselves as ethical subjects through an orientation to what they imagined as the 'real people behind the data', variously formulated as a Swedish population desiring data use for social benefit or a transnational public eager for research results. The intentions attributed to people, populations and publics - whom researchers only encountered in the abstract form of data - lent ethical weight to various and sometimes conflicting decisions about data security and sharing. Ultimately, researchers' anxieties about their inability to discern the desires of the 'real people' lent new appeal to solutions, however flawed, that promised to alleviate the ethical burden of personal data.