Fujimura Receives an NSF Scholars Award for Upcoming Project

Joan Fujimura recently received an NSF Scholars Award for her upcoming project, which examines the role of infrastructures in the production of knowledge about genetics, blood, and race. In particular, Fujimura and her team examine how cultural and social notions of contemporary racial groups became embedded in infrastructures developed and used to create knowledge. Infrastructure is a term that includes the databases, algorithms, models and practices used in scientific research. This study of scientific infrastructures also includes an analysis of policy decisions about which infrastructures to build and how to organize them; the laboratory practices, instruments, and decisions that create and structure the data in infrastructures; and the analytic processes through which data in infrastructures are used. Second, the project examines whether and how social assumptions and ideas about race and ethnicity become part of research and therapeutic infrastructures, practices, and outcomes. Infrastructures are not neutral knowledge-making machines.