Lo justo y lo injusto: un debate

In the Global North, DNA profiling has provided an especially powerful forensic resource for the enhancement of an “intelligence led” surveillance apparatus (Williams & Johnson, 2005). This has raised concerns about the development of technologies of biosurveilla nce that could be used to detect past, present and potentially future criminal conduct (Willia ms

& Johnson, 2005; Lyon, 2003; Lawless 2010).¹⁸ However, Williams and Wienroth argue that, despite concerns about surveillance, the role of DNA technologies in resolving identity issues related to criminal justice, civil justice and biological relationship testing, will only be strengthened over the next decades (2014, p. 259).¹⁹

Attending to the different spaces where technologies unfold and are enacted, the development of DNA identification and forensic technologies in the Global South raises other types of questions with concerns beyond data privacy and fears over biosurveilla nce strategies. For instance, in Latin America DNA databases have been created to identify

17 In 1984, Alec Jeffreys and his colleagues observed the existence of highly polymorphic “minisatellite”

regions that can provide an individual-specific DNA 'fingerprint' of general use in human genetic analysis . According to Jeffreys, the first application of this new technology was in 1985 when his technology was used in an immigration case to save a young boy. “It captured the public’s sympathy and imagination. It was science helping an individual challenge authority. Of all the cases this is the one that means most to me. The court allowed me to let the family know we had proved their case, and I shall never forget the look in the mother’s eyes.” (Jeffreys, The history of genetic fingerprinting, available at:

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/genetics/

jeffreys/history-gf, (Accessed March 2016).

18 For instance, since its creation in England and Wales in 1997, the National DNA Database has raised concerns about its broad coverage, under which DNA samples can be collected with no cap on how long can they be kept. DNA technologies allow modern governments to seek and utilise knowledge about their citizens. Therefore, concerns regarding violation of human right s and privacy, and questions over the capacities of the government for using increasing surveillance technologies , characterise academic and public debate (Dahl & Saetnam, 2009; Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2007).

19 To argue this, they cite Kim and Katsanis, (2013, p. 329) to assert that government operated DNA databases will grow from approximately 30 million profiles in 2011, to 100 million profiles in 2015.

47 victims of human rights violations, and, thus, have played an important role in politica l, social and familial reconstitutions in post-dictatorship scenarios (Smith, 2016;

Rosenblatt, 2015; Wagner, 2008). Research has suggested that forensic DNA identification technologies are a fundamental tool in the identification process of victims of violence, and are a core and contested site of identity formation for individuals and for the families affected (Haimes & Toom, 2014; Toom, 2015; Smith and Wagner, 2007).

Although DNA technologies have revolutionized forensics and facilitate human identification, the process of identifying victims entails an intensive interdiscipli nar y endeavour. Forensic methods, such as fingerprint analysis or facial reconstructio n techniques, rely on the “expert interpretation of observed patterns”, and, as such, their use is necessarily subjective. (Rosenblatt, 2015, p. 21).

STS approaches to forensic science have shown that scientific knowledge is not a passive product of nature waiting to being discovered, but a continually negotiated and crafted social product of human inquiry (Cozzens &Woodhouse, 1995). Scientific “expert evidence does not itself determine guilt or innocence; instead, its probative value depends upon circumstantial judgements that place the evidence within a story of the case at hand”

(Lynch, 2008, p. xvii). As Lynch and Woolgar argue:

[W]hat scientists laboriously piece together […]measure, show to one another, argue about, and circulate to others in their communities are not “natural objects” independent of cultural processes and literary forms. They are extracts, “tissue cultures”, and residues impressed within graphic matrices; ordered, shaped, and filtered samples;

carefully aligned photographic traces and chart recordings; and verbal accounts. These are the proximal “things” taken into the laboratory and circulated in print and they are a rich repository of ‘social’ actions.

(1990, p. 5.)

Among the highly standardised practices of forensic evidence production, objects are representations, “immutable mobiles” that can travel from messy crime scenes to

48 courtroom proceedings in which productive, contested and multiple realities can be built and judged to be more or less credible. According to Christopher Lawless (2016, p. 5) the production of “evidential meaning” derives from the subjective experience of forensic practitioners, informed by their experience of previous cases, as much as through

‘objective’ practices of ‘scientific’ meaning. Therefore, “the ‘technical contents’ of […]

[scientific investigations] made up a roster of ‘sociological’ topics, to be studied as situated processes of knowledge-production and not exclusively as methodological and epistemological concerns” (Lynch and Woolgar, 1988, p. 102). Considering this, M’charek (2008) uses forensic DNA profiles and the inference of visible traits as an example to argue that a DNA profile should be seen as an “articulate collective”. The term articulate places emphasis on DNA profiles as normative and active objects that make links between different sites and actors and order their inter-relations. This works in contrast to the embedded ideas of “objectivity” and neutrality with which DNA profiles are presented in courtroom proceedings, and in everyday life. The term “collective ”, refers to the variety of humans and things that DNA profiles bring together in fluid configurations, depending on where and what versions of the profile are performed—

whether a cheek swab, an electropherogram, a matching probability, etc. Thus an

“articulate collective” is neither fixed nor stable (2008, p. 521). Further, considering the new ethical considerations brought forward by new technologies, M’Charek (2008, p.

527) argues that politics and normativity are neither within the technology as a mode of technological determinism, nor outside technology (e.g. in the context in which they are used). Rather, normativity and politics are performed in the relationships that technologies establish. In short, the political and normative attributes of technology are not given in advance but are performed in practice.

Thus, in an effort to study the situated processes of forensic knowledge production, I emphasise the diverse spaces in which forensic technologies are practiced. In this thesis

49 I follow an approach to forensic science derived from STS in order to explore the possibilities that forensic technologies offer to humanitarian actions, such as the identification of victims after a disaster (Williams & Wienroth, 2014; Bennett 2014;

Haines and Toom, 2014), or the use of forensics to attend human rights violation cases.

My research dwells on the latter, since one of the dilemmas of forensic technologies is that its practice relies on a legitimate governmental authority. Thus, forensic science has faced important structural adjustments in spaces where the state and its institut io ns subverts the justice system. This has been the case in the context of political violence in Latin America and the Balkans on the latter half of the 20^th century (Wagner, 2008;

Rosenblatt, 2015; Snow et. al., 1989).

While there is a long history of the links between the state, security and the use of forensic technologies to create and govern populations, my research makes emphasis on the uses of these technologies to narrate stories that contravene male driven narratives of state control.²⁰ The alternative use of technologies opens up spaces for situated and embodied narratives of knowledge production that are missed by traditional understandings of the relation between forensic science and the state. Citizens’ use of lists, DNA samples, statistics and the development of search strategies are one of the multiple ways in which the politics of possibility of forensic technologies can be explored.

20 See for example Ian Hacking’s analysis on the use of statistics to make up populations (1986, 1990), or for the history of fingerprints (Cole, 2013) both practices born from colonial contexts. . For a critica l approach to border security see (Amoore 2011, 2013; Amoore and De Goede, 2008, 2008a). For an historical approach on the use of forensics as identifying and classifying techniques see Galton and Bertillo n uses of anthropometry.

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Forensic Technologies for Victim Identification in Disaster