Inherited trauma and anti-racism: reconciling biological and social approaches

Emerging scientific research in epigenetics, neuroscience, and cognate fields constructs racism as a trauma with heritable biological effects. Increasingly embraced in “trauma-informed” clinical interventions and social movements, these biological models are now salient to medical, therapeutic, and policy spheres, and are reshaping the identity-making practices of racialised communities. While some feminist and social theorists have critiqued such biological models of racism as potentially pathologising, their potential for anti-racist change is underexamined.

This project uses empirical methods to explore the varied and conflicting ways that anti-racist activists and health practitioners mobilize scientific research to understand the embodied impacts of racism. Drawing on scholarly frameworks from feminist science studies, and queer and feminist theories of trauma and embodiment, the project explores how we can conceptualise the embodied impacts of racism across disciplines. Intended outcomes include providing new data about changing understandings and practices of racialisation and anti-racism, and developing an interdisciplinary feminist framework for understanding racism at the juncture of the biological and the social.