ABR: Genetic Technology Development and International Security Efforts: Renewal

Genomics has become increasingly important for law and policing, as evidenced by the proliferation of national criminal DNA databases throughout the world. New national criminal DNA databases, once limited to high-income countries, are becoming widespread in middle-income countries and they are also beginning to be established in low-income countries.

But DNA databases require infrastructural resources and expertise to implement and maintain. How are places that are marked by capacity challenges and conditions of scarcity establishing and running DNA databases under these conditions, and how might their strategies inform the global future of this phenomenon? How does DNA become transformed into something that is reliable and useful in national legal contexts and in international security efforts, and what are the consequences for how science and citizenship are lived and experienced?

This research project will address these questions by investigating the intersection between genomics and law, related infrastructural investments, and the networks of people who must work together to transform genetic data into legally legible evidence. Further, this project supports the methods and data analysis training of two graduate students.

This research is supported as an accomplishment-based renewal of highly successful project exploring how the use of genetic technologies in criminal law might change experiences and forms of citizenship as well as social and cultural understandings of science and what constitutes reliable evidence. This research extends that completed through a previous grant by further investigating global criminal forensic genetics as an emerging and expanding citizenship formation with interconnected local, national, and transnational influences and implications.

The research will take place in a middle-income context that has been implementing and expanding a 2015 law that creates a criminal DNA database for which the police force has primary responsibility. The project will use ethnographic methodologies to consider how a cross-section of people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds who have different forms of expertise and different ideas about the meaning of science and justice are brought together through their roles in enacting investments in forensic genetics.

The project will include police, forensic laboratories, courtrooms, and NGOs and private companies that contribute to forensic genetics training and advocacy. In this research context investment in genomics for law enforcement is new and actively expanding throughout the research period. Those current investments raise important questions about the global scope and scale, and the local specificity and variation, of intersections between genomics and law.

This research therefore offers an actively emerging view into how DNA comes to matter in new ways as it moves out of research laboratories and into a broader public sphere.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.