The Making and Burning of Borders – on Historicity, Storytelling, and Forensic Methods A Conversation

In her work, M'charek not only traces the social life of fact/fiction about crimes, suspects, and origin stories, but also skilfully engages with the historical amnesia in Europe about racial violence, the ethics of care, and the necropolitics of borders. Her work is an example of how race matters, and how storytelling about race and racialisation is always relevant, even when it comes to the sciences. From DNA-typing and familial searching to facialisation and caring for the bodies of drowned refugees, M'charek’s extensive ethnographic work on forensic sciences across multiple sites highlights the complexity of these sciences in terms of material-symbolic entanglements. This interview with M'charek, by Tara Mehrabi, unpacks the sociopolitical lives of forensic processes and the tentacularity of forensic constructs to show how race, gender, migration, and technoscience shape one another. The interview pays particular attention to the ever-presence of death and dead matter in M'charek’s work through a decolonial and posthuman feminist lens.