About Rick W. A. Smith, Ph.D.
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. I am PI of the Critical Molecular Anthropology Lab and director of the Science and Society Research Hub. I am also a research affiliate with the Indigenous STS Lab in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta and a founding core faculty member of SING Canada.
I am a biocultural anthropologist working at the intersections of genomics and feminist, queer, and Indigenous Science and Technology Studies (STS). My work traces how shifting conditions of power become molecular. As both a geneticist and a critical scholar of science, I use the concept of “molecular” not only to account for the conjoined histories of social, political, ecological, and genetic change over millennia – but also to analyze the ways in which normative genome science, as a technology of colonialism, has attempted to naturalize colonial orders and their epistemes.
Working from an awareness of the knotted histories of science and colonialism in the Americas, my work takes on the genome lab as a site of critical reinvention. My work centers on three core areas:
Human population histories in relation to ancient urbanism, imperialism, and settler colonialism.
American ecologies that emerge from historical and ongoing impositions of colonial sex, family, and kinship.
Reorienting the creation and governance of genome research away from colonial dispossessions and toward the sovereignty of the nations, peoples, and communities I work with.
