Epigenetics and Politics in the Colonial Present

Abstract

This article draws attention to the importance of including the colonial present in critical inquiries into the relationship between epigenetics and politics. Focusing on British Columbia (Canada) at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the assessment illustrates how an epigenetic style of thought rendered tangible the “vulnerable Aboriginal child” as a category amenable to settler-colonial governmental interventions. More specifically, the article demonstrates how prominent elements of this classification interconnected with a mediating device undergirded by epigenetic reason, the Early Development Instrument. Eugenic sensibilities produced through epigenetic logics wove through this relationship. In turn, linkages between the EDI and the classification of the at-risk Aboriginal child comprised a terrain that shaped settler-colonial power and privilege through mechanisms of population management and related implications for territorial control. The article evaluates what these findings suggest for extending debates about the political elements of epigenetic reason.

Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape: The Politics of Epigenetic Hope and Reparation in Australia

“…Epigenetics may offer new strategies to lobby for protection from biosocial injury but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance that may follow from the identification of biological damage. In her work on Aboriginal children, epigenetics, and politics in British Columbia, Murray (2018) sounds a warning to such colonialist dynamics. She argues that an epigenetically grounded Early Development Instrument is based on the eugenic-based classification of “vulnerable Aboriginal children” (Murray 2018, 225), furthering State justification for biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives (such as forced relinquishment of children).…”

Circuits of Time: Enacting Postgenomics in Indigenous Australia

“…‘Science’, like all knowledges, is ‘polysemous, existing simultaneously as history, as myth, as political slogan, as social category, as technology’ (Abraham, 2006: 213). DOHaD and epigenetics (like any science) are ‘capable of many possible modes of assemblage and of providing alternative interpretations and meanings’ (Turnbull, 2000: 20), and its uptake varies according to different political contexts and agendas (Dubois et al, 2019; Dupras et al, 2019; Müller and Samaras, 2018; Murray, 2018; Pickersgill, 2018; Warin et al, 2019).…”