A comment on the Hill–Turney exchange: from normative antagonism to interdisciplinary collaboration

A recent issue of New Genetics and Society included an exchange between Hill (2011) and Turney (2011) discussing an earlier paper on the use of DNA identification in the Australian bushfires disaster of 2009 (Turney 2010). An editor's introduction to the exchange solicited further observations on the issues raised by the two participants (Glasner 2011).

What follows is a response to that solicitation. It has been written jointly by individuals from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds (including forensic genetics, forensic anthropology, sociology, bioethics, and science and technology studies) located within two research centers (the Northumbria University Centre for Forensic Science; the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre at Newcastle University). We currently collaborate on a range of research topics including the uses of the life sciences for disaster victim identification (DVI).1 Some of us have worked as scientists commissioned by the UK government and other agencies in response to particular disasters; others of us have an interest in the formation of policy and in the uses of science and technology as they affect a range of social goods including health, justice and security.

Arguments about the nature of scientific explanations and their relationship to wider social and cultural meanings are not new (see for example Latour 1999 and Nelkin 1996). We are struck by echoes in the Hill–Turney exchange of many other instances in which a commitment to scientific authority is seen as antagonistic to other social imperatives (for example, in the forensic context, there have been many arguments about the “mismatch” between necessary features of scientific explanations, such as their probabilistic nature, and their relationship to legal imperatives, such as the need for decisions “beyond reasonable doubt”).2 However, the particular tension at work in the Hill–Turney exchange is that between the orientation of forensic science practice to the production of “legally authorized identification” and the perspectives of those who apparently seek “good enough” knowledge of the fate of their relatives, in what are officially designated as “open disasters” in which there are known to be particular difficulties of certainty around victim identification.3 Hill claims to write on behalf of the former and Turney claims to write on behalf of the latter. The problem we have with the substance and tone of this debate is the unwillingness of either participant to reflect critically on the presuppositions of their own professional and personal locations, and hence on their inevitable partisanship. This unwillingness fuels a subsequent failure to envisage a form of analysis in which the nature and consequences of occupying each position become empirical topics for inquiry rather than (as in the Hill–Turney exchange) normative resources for arguments.

Jasanoff's (1995) response to earlier claims concerning the seemingly inescapable tensions between law and science was to identify the need to grasp the processes of mutual influence and accommodation that shape understandings across both domains. It seems to us that Turney and Hill both need to take similar steps, in order to see how each of their approaches could add to, rather than detract from, the knowledge that can be obtained from any one particular disaster to improve scientific and organizational responses to future disasters. Accordingly, instead of aligning ourselves with either Hill or Turney, we prefer an approach which examines, critically and from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the role that a number of forensic science resources – including forensic genetics – play in the identification of victims following both naturally occurring and humanly occasioned mass disasters. Many countries have established complex infrastructural arrangements to support DVI work both at home and abroad, and these resources are underpinned by a range of assumptions about biological facts, technological reliability, statistical reasoning and routine practices in pathology and associated disciplines. The willingness to invest in these resources testifies to the social, emotional and political significance of that work for governments and for citizens. There is a complex and developing cluster of expectations, promises, beliefs and practices relating to meanings of evidence and identity that bring together the interests of “scientific” and “lay” actors, in ways that are sometimes disturbing and which require further scrutiny.

Such a scrutiny needs to begin by locating any particular perspective within the wider cultural, scientific and physical terrain that constitutes the “mass disaster” in order to map out the various cross-cutting participants and goals that are, and that become, involved in responding to that disaster. It is immediately apparent, for example, that there are many more parties and perspectives than just the two presented in the Hill–Turney debate. Either side's claims to represent the definitive or most important perspective are partial and inadequate. Other invisible but nonetheless influential parties are the populations and communities affected by past disasters and likely future disasters. The media also plays a significant but often unacknowledged role in framing the event itself and subsequent inquiries, through the choice of language and the willingness to focus on particular actions and antagonisms. An important group that is mentioned but not adequately analyzed is that comprising the agencies (truly invisible but nonetheless highly influential for the conduct of those present at a disaster) that provide international guidelines for handling such events. The guidelines are based on past experience and designed to mitigate the effects of future disasters. They are of course highly significant for Hill's understandings of the appropriate procedures to follow in any one particular disaster, but their origins and histories remain socially shaped accomplishments that have yet to be examined.

Noting this also points up a major disjuncture between Hill's and Turney's orientations to this issue. Hill defends the Australian forensic and other practices as being an instance of the wider category, “mass disasters.” In contrast, Turney focuses on the details of the particular case (and then on a particular group within that case, the “grieving relatives”) and then appears to use that case to define the overall category and to determine what should happen if similar disasters occurred again. Hill, guided by international protocols, is oriented to past and future large-scale populations affected by mass disasters whereas Turney is oriented to the “unheard voices” of families within one disaster (and possibly only two or three families within that disaster – the details of her “data” are unclear). It is noteworthy that Turney presents families' needs and sentiments as irrefutable and unchallengeable and therefore as necessarily constituting the dominant frame of reference for all decisions in handling the disaster – in a way that parallels the manner in which Hill is accused of presenting science. In Turney's privileging of relatives' grief and interests we are reminded of other situations where the imperatives of science and kinship have apparently been in tension, such as the UK Alder Hey hospital tissue scandal (see Redfern 2001). While the impact of the bushfire deaths on surviving relatives and communities should not be dismissed, Turney fails to give sufficient weight to Hill's (and other forensic scientists') orientation to wider goals and audiences. Hill, on the other hand, in hearing the discourse of critical analysis as necessarily being “criticism” (though his interpretation is understandable given the use of the word “failure” in Turney's title) attempts to defend rather than explain the forensic scientists' moves between the various registers of knowledge available to them.

The logic of recent and current arrangements for the application of forensic science to DVI is already described in several official publications (e.g. National Institute of Justice 2006, Tidball-Binz 2007, Interpol 2009), and there are professional reference texts which provide further resources to working scientists (e.g. Khardori 2006, Moore and Lakha 2006, Black et al. 2010). There have been major reviews of current practice (e.g. Prinz et al. 2007) and special journal issues on forensic responses to DVI in general and to specific events in particular (e.g. Thompson and Evison 2003, Drummer and Cordner 2011). Finally, there have been social science studies (e.g. Klinenberg 2001, Wagner 2008, Petrović-Śteger 2009), and socio-political reflections on these scientific and organizational undertakings (e.g. Casper and Moore 2009, Edkins 2011).

However, moving beyond the specifics of the Australian bushfires disaster, there is at present a lack of detailed studies of situated DVI forensic practices and their relationship to wider legal and social concerns. An adequate account of such practices would clarify at what points, and in what ways, mass disaster (or mass fatality) protocols are brought into play to deal with victim identification in particular instances; how various national jurisdictions and expert institutions collaborate in complex identification efforts; at what point, and in what way, detailed laboratory-based processes of forensic science investigations are used; and at what points and in what ways investigators use relatives' situated everyday knowledge in determining the movements and likely locations, as well as the identification, of bodies. The power of coronial authorities to rule on acceptable kinds of scientific practice and standards for identification are also central issues to be considered by such research. How, when, by whom, why, and with what effects, a variety of knowledges are deployed and governed, are all empirical questions deserving further attention.

Finally, from our critical and multi-disciplinary standpoint, we suggest that both the objectification of the scientific gaze (Hill) and the subjectification of the phenomenological perspective (Turney) are historically contingent, but powerful, ways of comprehending both live and dead bodies in contemporary society. Both of them interact in complex ways with a variety of national and international legal imperatives. Bodies are natural objects and cultural constructions, and they are understood – whether as fragments or as wholes – through the recurrent objectification and subjectification practices of various agents and aggregates that may give them significance. Living persons enact culturally and socially constructed identities and their unique biographies are also captured – in Kripke's (1980) term – by a variety of scientific and/or legal “rigid identifiers.” For the living, both registers of identity and identification are often seamlessly connected; a person can mobilize both registers at the same time, using several methods to communicate his or her identity, combining having an identity and being identified. However, the daunting task facing forensic scientists in DVI and similar situations is to draw upon a variety of collection practices and analytical technologies in order to contribute to the “reattachment” of rigid identifiers to recovered human remains. This is complex intellectual, material, and emotional work, more deserving of close analysis than either positive or negative polemical characterization.

By choosing to antagonize their exchange, Hill and Turney have missed an opportunity to contribute to an analysis of the interplay of forensic and other knowledges and preferences in DVI work, and both have therefore missed an opportunity to learn from each other for the benefit of all those caught up – as professionals or as surviving kin – in future disasters. Despite their differences, however, there is also common ground in that both are determined to improve future DVI processes. In order to understand more fully the scientific, social, ethical, psychological and political impacts of the range of current DVI practices and technologies, it is necessary to explore, with care and in detail, the organization and meaning of the ways in which these are put to use. A comprehensive perspective also requires the capacity to scrutinize the disciplinary assumptions behind different descriptions and defenses of DVI practices and the social responses to them. Declarative and accusative exchanges between forensic and social scientists, like the one that has provoked this response, does not help to advance this kind of necessary work.4

Notes

Included among these disasters are natural events like fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, catastrophic and large-scale transport accidents and failures, military atrocities, and terrorist attacks.

Such arguments are discussed in Kiely (2006), Fraser and Williams (2010) and in many other similar texts.

Interpol (2009, p. 3) defines an “open disaster” as “… a major catastrophic event resulting in the deaths of unknown individuals for whom no prior records or descriptive data are available. It is difficult to obtain information about the actual number of victims following such events.” While much depends on what counts as adequate “prior records or descriptive data” in this definition, there is international agreement on the operational utility of distinguishing such events from “closed disasters” in which there is “fixed and identifiable group (e.g. aircraft crash with a passenger list).”

In September 2011, The Centre for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University held a workshop on the “Ethics of post-conflict and post-disaster DNA identification” in which many of the issues we raise here were discussed (see http://www.cmu.edu/chrs/conferences/eppi/program.html). From 4 to 7 December 2012, our two UK centers are organizing a workshop “Naming the dead: the ethical, social, and legal issues of disaster victim identification by DNA” at the Fondation Brocher, Geneva, Switzerland, to be attended by a range of experts including academics, policy makers, and practitioners. A website for the Fondation Brocher workshop will be available, with more information, in early 2012.