Dr. Rick W. A. Smith

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 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 worked to naturalize colonial orders and their epistemes.