Prof. Dr. Jenny Reardon – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Jenny Reardon

University of California
Sociology and History of Science, Science and Technology Studies

External Senior Fellow
March 2024 – August 2024

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Reardon’s research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science studies, feminist and critical race studies, and the sociology of science, technology and medicine. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). She was the PI of the NSF grant that funded the creation of the Science and Justice Training Program (SJTP), an internationally unique pedagogical effort to provide the transdisciplinary training needed to create a next generation of scholars able to recognize and respond to places where questions of science meet questions of justice. She is currently the PI of the NSF grant that supports the first phase of the Leadership in the Equitable and Ethical Design (LEED) of STEM initiative. She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from, among others, the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Humboldt Foundation, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and the United States Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Selected Publications

Reardon, Jenny; Lee, Sandra Soo-Jin; Goering, Sara; Fullerton, Stephanie M.; Cho, Mildred K., Panofsky, Aaron; Hammonds, Evelynn M. 2023. “Trustworthiness matters: Building equitable and ethical science.” Cell 186 (5), P894-898.
Reardon, Jenny. 2020. “Why and How Bioethics Must Turn Towards Justice: A Modest Proposal.” Hastings Center Report 50(S1): S70-S76. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hast.1158?af=R
Reardon, Jenny. 2017. The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (University of Chicago Press)..
Reardon, Jenny with Kim Tallbear. 2012. “Your DNA is Our History”: Genomics, Anthropology, and the Construction of Whiteness as Property.” Current Anthropology 53 (S5).
Reardon, Jenny. 2005. Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University).

FRIAS Project

A Genealogy of Expert Statements on ‘Race’ and Genetics: 1950 to the Present

Through archival research and analysis of secondary literature, this project seeks to understand the role that ‘expert’ statements about race and genetics/genomics have played in constituting the credibility of institutions of science and of politics in the second half of the 20^th and the first half of the 21^st century. It will use MAXQDA qualitative data analysis software to code the over 1000 letters contained in the UNESCO Statements on Race archive in Paris, as well as relevant plenary sessions of UNESCO, in order to track strategies social scientists, geneticists, and anthropologists used to establish their expertise, and to draw lines between “scientific” and “ideological” approaches to the study of human difference and ‘race.’ The project contributes to efforts to rethink and restructure the sciences—natural and social—in a manner that is cognizant of and responsive to the legacies of racism that have shaped them.