OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
In this presentation, I uncover an overlooked genealogy of biometrics, tracing it back to early 20th-century race science and the rise of statistical thinking about human identity. Before biometrics became a technology of controlling human identity, it was a science aimed at understanding human diversity, specifically racial diversity. I examine the emergence of craniometry in the 19th century and how its methodologies paved the way for a novel approach to racial anthropology driven by mathematical statistics in the early 20th century. Finally, I explore the postwar development of computerized anthropology.
Iris Clever is a historian of science, technology, and the body, and currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. Her book project, The Afterlives of Skulls: How Race Science Became a Data Science, traces the surprising origins of modern data technologies in colonial race science, revealing how the racialization of human bodies lies at the foundation of modern science. Her work has been published in Isis, Perspectives on Science, and is forthcoming in American Anthropologist.
Registration is required for online attendance only, here: zoom.us/meeting/register/2Eyuy06tTaCktw3CGdfT1Q#/registration.
