AFS Folklore and Science Section Hosts Prize Panel: “DNA Identities: Narrative and Authority in Genetic Ancestry Performance on YouTube”

Join the AFS Folklore and Science Section on February 21 from 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm (ET) as the 2023 winner of the American Folklore Society’s Folklore & Science Prize Leah Lowthorp (University of Oregon) presents her prize-winning study, “DNA Identities: Narrative and Authority in Genetic Ancestry Performance on YouTube.” Lowthorp’s talk will address the rise of direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing and the genetic ancestry “reveal” on YouTube. Lowthorp’s study seeks to understand such performances in relation to [1] the authority performers grant test results to inform racial and/or ethnic identities, [2] how performers establish hierarchies of knowledge when family folklore and genetic test results collide, and [3] what these performances reveal about conceptions of genetic determinism today.

This truly interdisciplinary panel will also feature discussion from two experts in genetics: biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks (UNC Charlotte), who is author of the book Is Science Racist? (Polity, 2017) and molecular anthropologist Theodore Schurr (University of Pennsylvania), whose forthcoming book is titled, The Peopling of the Caucasus: Early Human Settlement at the Crossroads of Continents (Cambridge, forthcoming 2024).