Di 12.12.2023, 18 Uhr, Großer Senat, Neue Aula, Geschwister Scholl Platz, Tübingen
Die Global Encounter Lecture Series wird in Kooperation mit der Global Encounters research platform der Universität Tübingen organisiert. Die Plattform bringt unter dem Titel „Global Encounters“ Forscher:innen aus den Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften zusammen, die die sozialen und kulturellen Auswirkungen von Mobilität und Kommunikation untersuchen.
Dr. Àlex Mas-Sandoval „The genetic footprint of racial and gender hierarchies“
Abstract: Most American populations descend from indigenous Americans, European colonisers and sub-Saharan African slaves. However, the admixture process resulting from the colonisation of the Americas is constrained by socioeconomic and cultural stratification. By analysing the DNA fragments of each individual that are inherited from each of these three ancestral populations, we quantify how much the mating has not been random related to the genetic ancestry proportions of males and females. In this way, we reconstruct how interactions between racial and gender hierarchies shaped population stratification since the colonisation of the Americas. We challenge the oversimplified understanding that mestizaje reduces population stratification: a high degree of mixture cannot translate into a decrease in inequality if it occurs with strongly gendered patterns. Finally, we analyse the role of racialised phenotypes in stratifying the population beyond the effect of socioeconomic stratification. Overall, we show how social stratification leaves a footprint in the genetic structure of human populations and how, by studying it, we can reconstruct the evolution of inequalities throughout human history.
Bionote: Àlex Mas-Sandoval is a population geneticist that studies how evolutionary processes driven by social structure and cultural changes impact the genetic diversity of populations. He got his PhD at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF), in Barcelona, and at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre. There he focused on the reconstruction of the precolonial demographic history from admixed populations of Brazil. Then, during a Postdoc at Imperial College London, he studied how social hierarchies constrain the mating patterns and the admixture dynamics of the populations of the Americas. As a postdoctoral researcher at Università di Bologna, he is focused on understanding the socioeconomic factors that drive assortative mating in these populations.
Dr. Mas-Sandoval is currently a short-term visiting researcher at Universität Tübingen in the framework of the Global Encounters platform, aiming to disentangle how social inequalities and population stratification have impacted a wide range of populations across time and space.