This presentation introduces an ongoing ethnographic project that examines the expansion of a national criminal DNA database in South Africa. It considers the material, political, and affective work that genetic technologies are made to do in relation to postcolonial law and policing. The project as a whole investigates global criminal forensic genetics as an emerging citizenship formation with interconnected local, national, and transnational influences and implications. It uses ethnographic methodologies to consider how a cross-section of people from diverse social and political backgrounds who have different forms of expertise and different ideas about the meaning of science and justice are brought together through their roles in enacting South Africa’s emerging investment in forensic genetics.
