2002 Ph.D. Medical Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco
1997 M.A. Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
1994 B.A. Social Sciences, University of California, Berkley
Duana Fullwiley
Research Fellow
Department of Society, Human Development, and Health
Harvard UniversityScience Center, 1 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
617.496.0836
dfullwil@hsph.harvard.edu
Research
My work details the ways that the genome—often talked about as differing significantly in populations that are seen as somehow “isolated”—is inherently social as well as biological. It is social both in the ways that genetic differences found in it are defined as meaningful, or not, for the lives and livelihoods of certain groups (whether or not genomic function has been determined) and in the ways that meanings ascribed to physiological entities owe much of their specificity to cultural, economic, and ecological contexts when genetic function is observed.
I have three research projects. The first is a book on how cultural practices of healing and ideas of disease severity infuse biomedical, genetic, and general scientific renderings of sickle cell anemia in postcolonial Senegal, West Africa. Carried out in both French and Wolof, in both Paris and Dakar, in hospitals, labs, market places, traditional healing circles, peoples' homes and their extended social networks, my eventual monograph will prove one of the first ethnographies of sickle cell disease and cultural uptakes of biomedical genetics in Africa.
My second project is a series of articles (and an eventual monograph) on emerging trends in American genome sciences that aim to tailor pharmaceuticals to individual genetic profiles (pharmacogenomics). This research has led me to also analyze trends in popular gene analysis, such as what is named “recreational ancestry mapping,” that are technologically tied to pharmacogenomics. Both comprise elements of a process I am calling the molecularization of race.
Lastly, I have recently begun new research on malaria and sickle cell trait suffering. As a collaborative project with colleagues in Dakar, Senegal, this work explores the dearth of science on how malaria affects those with sickle cell trait (as most of the literature details how the latter bears on the former). Through ethnography, as well as biomedical assays, this work explores the links between urbanization, ecology, biology, affect and economy.
