ABSTRACT
Although concerns that contemporary genetic research may promote racism must be taken seriously, most academic critiques of the role of ‘genetics’ in the public sphere are grounded on faulty theories that imagine language as mechanical, autonomous, and uniform. The chapter overviews the research on public understandings of ‘race and genetics’, a research body which shows the inaccuracies in predictions, worries, and prescriptions based in such language theories. It offers instead a use-oriented theory of language that resurrects and refashions the rhetorical notion of pluripotential agonistics among socialized bodies, a theory which suggests the desirability both of alternative approaches to understanding the relationship between scientific research and public discourse, and of precluding racist social impacts from ‘genetics’.
