About

Duana Fullwiley is a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University with research interests spanning anthropology of science, medicine, and well-being. Her work explores how social identities, health outcomes, and scientific narratives intersect, with a focus on genetics, race, ethnicity, migration, and environmental resource scarcity. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the US, France, and Senegal, and her first book, The Enculturated Gene, examines sickle cell health politics and biological difference in West Africa, highlighting how African sickle cell is ordered in ethnic-national terms at the genetic level. This book has received notable awards, including the Amaury Talbot Prize and the Robert B. Textor and Family Prize. Her second book, Tabula Raza, investigates how U.S. political concepts of race influence genetic research and personal genomics, and it has also garnered prestigious awards. Since 2019, she has been studying inequities in human migration, focusing on West African migration to Europe, and how science, technology, and environmental factors shape these trajectories. Her research has been funded by multiple foundations and agencies, and she has held various scholarly positions internationally, including at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation in Paris, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Harvard School of Public Health.

Research topics

• Cognitive psychology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Psychotherapist
• Neuroscience

Selected publications

• Feminist Cyberlaw

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024

  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  This vibrant and visionary reimagining of the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens brings together emerging and established scholars and practitioners to explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. It promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.

  DOI

• Tabula Raza

  2024-03-18

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 6. A Family Affair: The Barbed Bonds of Relationship

  2024-04-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 4. For the Love of Blackness: When Science Can Feel Like Home

  2024-04-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 7. Sci Non-Fi: Cells, Genes, and the Future Tense of “Diversity”

  2024-04-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tabula Raza

  2024-04-02 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve. Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza , has a very specific and familiar history—one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.

  PublisherDOI

• 3. Making Race: Pharmacogenetics and Its Necessary People

  2024-04-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5. Look, a Black Guy! (With a Genetic Finding)

  2024-04-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Guidelines for genetic ancestry inference created through roundtable discussions

  Human Genetics and Genomics Advances · 2023-01-13 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  The use of genetic and genomic technology to infer ancestry is commonplace in a variety of contexts, particularly in biomedical research and for direct-to-consumer genetic testing. In 2013 and 2015, two roundtables engaged a diverse group of stakeholders toward the development of guidelines for inferring genetic ancestry in academia and industry. This report shares the stakeholder groups' work and provides an analysis of, commentary on, and views from the groundbreaking and sustained dialogue. We describe the engagement processes and the stakeholder groups' resulting statements and proposed guidelines. The guidelines focus on five key areas: application of genetic ancestry inference, assumptions and confidence/laboratory and statistical methods, terminology and population identifiers, impact on individuals and groups, and communication or translation of genetic ancestry inferences. We delineate the terms and limitations of the guidelines and discuss their critical role in advancing the development and implementation of best practices for inferring genetic ancestry and reporting the results. These efforts should inform both governmental regulation and self-regulation.

  PublisherDOI

• The song of power

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2021-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper I take the form of the fugue in music to query a contemporary dynamic. It is one where hopefulness entwines with worrisome, oppressive realities that pervade biosocial trends concerning race. Genetic ancestry testing, forensic uses of DNA, and President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative are all examined as aspects of this cultural moment where biosociality must be engaged for its potential contradictory outcomes, which I argue are regenerative in form, yet often dystopian.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Susan M. Reverby

  55 shared

• Alondra Nelson

  55 shared

• Evelynn M. Hammonds

  Harvard University

  51 shared

• Lundy Braun

  Brown University

  51 shared

• William Quivers

  51 shared

• Alexandra E. Shields

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  51 shared

• Anne Fausto‐Sterling

  50 shared

• Helen Y. Weng

  Apple (United States)

  10 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  Stanford University

  2011

Awards & honors

• Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2011 Amaury Talbot Prize f…
• American Anthropological Association’s 2014 Robert B. Textor…
• Diana Forsythe Prize granted by the Committee for the Anthro…
• C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Soci…