Death and Dignity: Forensic Science and

Forensic scientific investigations of mass political violence have proliferated in recent decades. As a form of “science in the service of human rights,” forensic methods are used to locate and identify the remains of people killed in mass political violence and, more broadly, to corroborate witness testimonies of rights abuses and contribute evidence for potential use in war crimes trials. Yet forensic investigations of mass violence are not only scientific endeavors, but also highly social and political ones. Families of the dead and disappeared have long been at the forefront of demanding state action to locate, exhume, and return the remains of their loved ones. What drives states, on the one hand, and families of the dead and disappeared, on the other, to turn to forensic exhumations of the dead? What social and political work does forensic science—and the dead bodies it unveils—do to mediate restorative transformation in the wake of mass political violence?

This course explores how the forensic sciences—in particular, forensic anthropology, archaeology, and genetics—are mobilized after atrocity to make rights claims to postmortem dignity, postwar memory, and transformative justice. It approaches forensic science from a holistic (or, in anthropological terms, “four-field”) perspective, in which the scientific cannot be separated from the social or political, given the profound social transformations brought about by war. Practices in biological and forensic science cannot be separated from the social and political contexts of the political violence and human rights violations they investigate. What would it look like to conceive of forensic science from a multi-focal, interdisciplinary perspective? 

This discussion-based seminar explores the complex social and scientific worlds that come into being over the course of postwar forensic exhumations, bringing the living and the dead into new forms of relation. We situate forensic investigations within broader struggles over historical and collective memory, narratives of past violence, and accountability for state violence. Drawing primarily on ethnographic and sociocultural anthropological perspectives from Latin America and other global regions, the course engages debates on international humanitarianism, necropolitics, and human rights in death. We critically assess the promises and limits of forensic science as a tool for human rights intervention, while remaining attentive to its af