Alondra Nelson

Alondra Nelson
Born	c. 1972 Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.
Alma mater	University of California, San Diego New York University
Occupation(s)	Sociologist Historian Professor
Employer	Columbia University
Known for	science and technology studies political sociology cultural sociology African American studies
Website	Alondra Nelson at Columbia University Alondra Nelson's Website

Alondra Nelson (born c. 1972) is an award-winning American sociologist and author. She is the inaugural Dean of Social Science at Columbia University in the City of New York.

Career

Nelson received her B.A. in anthropology with high distinction from the University of California at San Diego, graduating magna cum laude in 1994. At UCSD, she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University in 2003.

From 2003-2009, she was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale University, where she was the recipient of the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching Excellence and was a Faculty Fellow in Trumbull College. At Yale, Nelson was the first black woman to join the Department of Sociology faculty.

Nelson was recruited to Columbia from Yale in 2009. She is the first African American to be tenured in the Department of Sociology at this institution. She has directed the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality and is now Dean of Social Science for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia.

Nelson is a member of the Council on Big Data, Ethics, and Society. She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Data and Society Research Institute in New York city and the Center for Research on the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of Psychiatric, Neurologic and Behavioral Genetics at the Columbia University Medical Center. She served on the Executive Committee of the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Board of Governors for the Society of Fellows at Columbia and is Chair-Elect of the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Nelson has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics, the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, the Bavarian American Academy, and the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University. She sits on the editorial boards of Social Studies of Science, Public Culture, and Social Text.

Writings

Nelson writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality. Her book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination was praised by Publishers Weekly as deserving "commendation for its thoughtfulness and thoroughness," was noted as "a much-needed and major work that will set the standard for scholars" by the American Historical Review, and was hailed by leading scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as "a revelation" and "a tremendously important book."

Kirkus Reviews described The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome, Nelson's book about the uses of genetic ancestry testing in Black communities, as a "meticulously detailed" work that "adds another chapter to the somber history of injustice toward African-Americans, but... one in which science is enriching lives by forging new identities and connections to ancestral homelands."

Named one of "13 Notable Blacks In Technology" by Black Voices, she established the Afrofuturism on-line community in 1998 and edited an eponymous special issue of the journal Social Text in 2002.

Nelson's writing deals with the intersection of technology, culture, and new media, and how these lenses can be used to address the continuing impacts of African Diaspora. She is among a small group of critical theorists studying and discussing Afrofuturism, an emerging theoretical and cultural aesthetic. Particularly, her essay "Future Texts" lends insight to the inequitable access to technologies between whites and blacks. Nelson explained Afrofuturism as a way of looking at the subject position of black people that covers themes of alienation and aspirations for a utopic future. The idea of "alien" or "other" is a theme often explored. Additionally, Nelson notes that discussions around race, access, and technology often bolster uncritical claims about a so-called "digital divide". The digital divide overemphasizes the association of racial and economic inequality with limited access to technology. She writes, "Blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress." Nelson explores the way artists and writers have adopted older forms of technology and retrofitted them to promote a black aesthetic.

She is co-editor with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History. Nelson is also co-editor, with Thuy Linh N. Tu, of Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, one of the first scholarly works to examine the racial politics of contemporary technoculture. Her writing and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Guardian (London) and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications.

Awards and fellowships

Nelson has received several awards over the course of her career in addition to the Poorvu teaching award. Her book, Body and Soul, was recognized with the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, the Letitia Woods Brown Award, the Best Book Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology and the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award (Section on Race, Class and Gender). This book was also a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award.

In 2013, Nelson received the Just Wellness Award from the Third Root Community Health Center for writing Body and Soul, a "work at the nexus of healing and social justice."

Nelson is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Personal life

Born in Bethesda, Maryland, Nelson was raised in San Diego, California. She attended the University of San Diego High School.

Bibliography

Books

• 2001. Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. New York University Press, ed. with Thuy Linh Tu ISBN 0-8147-3604-1.
• 2002. Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text. Duke University Press, ISBN 0-8223-6545-6.
• 2011. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0-8166-7648-8.
• 2012. Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History. Rutgers University Press, ed. with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee, ISBN 0-8135-5255-9.
• 2016. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome. Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-3301-4.

Articles and book chapters

• 2000. "Afrofuturism: Past Future Visions", Colorlines
• 2006. "A Black Mass as Black Gothic: Myth and Bioscience in Black Cultural Nationalism". In Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Crawford (eds), New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0-8135-3695-2.
• 2007. Lundy, Braun, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Duana Fullwiley, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, et al. "Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?". PLoS: Medicine 4(9): 1423–28.
• 2007. Deborah Bolnick, Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, Richard Cooper, Joan H. Fujimura, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Jonathan Marks, Ann Morning, Alondra Nelson, et al. "The Business and Science of Genetic Ancestry Testing", Science 318 (5849): 399–400.
• 2008. "The Factness of Diaspora". In Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson (eds), Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• 2008. "Bio Science: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry". Social Studies of Science 38 (5): 759–783.
• 2009. Adele E. Clarke, Janet Shim, Sara Shostak and Alondra Nelson. "Biomedicalising genetic health, diseases and identities". The Handbook of Genetics & Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era. London: Routledge.
• 2011. Alondra Nelson and Jeong Won Hwang. '"Roots and Revelation: Genetic Ancestry Tracing and the YouTube Generation". In Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (eds), Race After the Internet, New York: Routledge, 271–290.
• 2013. Alondra Nelson. "DNA Ethnicity as Black Social Action?" Cultural Anthropology 28 (3): 527–536.
• 2014. Alondra Nelson and Joan H. Robinson. "The Social Life of DTC Genetics". In Daniel Lee Kleinman and Kelly Moore (eds), Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society. London: Routledge.

External links

• Alondra Nelson website
• "Dean of Social Science", Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University
• "Alondra Nelson, Department of Sociology", Columbia University
• Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University
• Afrofuturism