Lindsay Adams Smith

This ethnographic dissertation examines DNA identification technologies and their relationship to political, social, and familial reconstitution in post-dictatorship Argentina. It focuses on two groups, one organized around the recovery of their kidnapped grandchildren and the other organized around the identification of the bodies of the 30,000 disappeared. Through the comparison of these seemingly similar movements, which nonetheless constitute separate social movements and use different technological approaches, this study explores the coproduction of scientific and political orders in the midst of a seemingly endless process of “transitional” justice.