Reflection Post

I found Fullwiley’s paper to be a very compelling study of how the objectivity of scientific ‘facts’ breaks down under scrutiny of the human intervention that was necessary to obtain said facts.

She gave a thoroughly yet unsatisfyingly textured picture of the tension between Burchard’s beliefs that 1) there exist health disparities that were born from state policy enacted on the basis of racist notions of human difference; 2) there is a biological basis to race; and 3) in establishing said biological basis to race in his research, Burchard can combat 1).... By the end of the article I still felt like she could have done more but I wasn't sure how.... The transcripts of her conversations in the lab were strong demonstrations of how Burchard’s personal motivations/biases involving race corrupt the “objectivity” of his research and results, but they also made me wonder whether Burchard would be comfortable with her analysis and whether Fullwiley herself ‘makes the data stronger’ in her cherrypicking of conversations.

Fullwiley definitely helped me make sense of Latour.  Even though Latour makes his argument about the power contained in the apparatus and opacity of the ‘lab’ through the Pasteur example, I was having a hard time following him and buying his argument until I tried to think about what Latour would say about Fullwiley’s research. I’m still not sure I totally grasped Latour’s argument, but what I took from it (which may be off base) became clearer to me during Fullwiley’s more technical criticism of Burchard’s statistical analysis and methodology of his experiments—e.g. on pages 714/715 and on page 722, when she talks to one of his research assistants about ‘making the data stronger.’  I saw these moments when Fullwiley complicated and teased out the ‘grey’ areas of Burchard’s data as moments where power was generated though the ‘change of scale’ that Latour claims can invert/rearrange power relations in the world.