Lindsay Smith
Speaker
Associate Professor of Science, Technology & Innovation in the Borderlands, Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society.
Deep Forensics: A Conversation on Disappearance, Technology, and Layered Violence in Mexico
Date and Time
April 15, 2026
04:00PM - 06:00PM EDT
Location
MIT, Room E51-095
In Mexico, where more than 130,000 people are missing, and over 72,000 bodies remain unidentified, extraordinary violence has become embedded in the fabric of ordinary life. In this conversation, we bring complementary perspectives to bear on this crisis: one focused on the grassroots forensic practices of buscadora collectives —groups of family members, predominantly women and allied scientists, searching for their disappeared loved ones— and the other on the work of state experts, institutions, and practitioners deploying forensic technologies in novel and sometimes unexpected ways.
Together, we explore emergent forensic practices and technologies in Mexico and how these become entangled with —and sometimes transformative of— institutional responses to ongoing violence. A key point of convergence is the question of layered, sedimented harm and its attendant temporalities: what role can technology play in revealing forms of violence that accumulate slowly, across time and terrain? How might emergent socio-forensic assemblages provide alternative registers to address systemic entrenched harms and project long-term just futures?
This event is part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Featured Speakers
Vivette García Deister
Speaker
Professor in the Faculty of Science, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Eden Medina
Moderator
Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT
Bios
Her work explores the power—and the limits—of scientific technologies in confronting impunity and violence during democratic transitions. Through long-term collaborations with human rights movements in Latin America, Smith examines how communities have reimagined emergent technologies like genetics, biometrics, and GIS—not just as forensic instruments but as ways to craft new forms of justice that challenge conventional ideas of citizen science and state authority. She leads the STSborderlands working group, an interdisciplinary network of scholars rethinking the entanglements of science, technology, colonialism, and place across the Mexican Borderlands. Her work has been published in Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology & Human Values, and American Anthropologist, among other journals in Anthropology, Latin American studies, and STS. Smith is currently completing a National Science Foundation CAREER project that investigates hybrid technologies of migration—technologies that operate at the nexus of surveillance and human rights in the U.S.-Mexico border region.
She uses ethnographic methods, transnational history, and the philosophy of science-in-practice to study the relationships between science, technology, and society. Vivette has analyzed the developments of biomedical and forensic genetics and their impact on health, racism, and justice in Mexico. Currently, she studies the treatment of ancient and contemporary human remains in forensic and historical research. Vivette is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society. She has published two books, dozens of research and outreach articles and chapters, and has written for Slate, Este País, Animal Político, Cronopio, and Letras Libres.
Eden Medina is a Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her work uses technology as a means to understand historical processes and she combines history, science and technology studies, and Latin American studies in her writings. Her current book project, Bones and Lives: Making and Unmaking Truth After Dictatorship (Duke University Press, under contract), studies how nations use science and technology to address histories of dictatorship and state violence and how science and technology intertwine with processes of truth, justice, and repair. More broadly her research studies the history of science and technology in Latin America and the ways that political projects shape, and are shaped by, technologies such as computers.
Medina is the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011), which won the Edelstein Prize for outstanding book in the history of technology, the Computer History Museum Prize for outstanding book in the history of computing, and the Book Prize of the Recent History and Memory Section (honorable mention) of the Latin American Studies Association. Her co-edited volume Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America (MIT Press, 2014) received the Amsterdamska Award from the European Society for the Study of Science and Technology.
In addition to her books, she has published on topics as diverse as big data and algorithmic regulation, human rights, computer science education, and the relationship of technology and politics. She is the recipient of the IEEE Life Members’ Prize in Electrical History awarded by the Society for the History of Technology for the best paper of the year in electrical history.
Medina’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, Mellon Foundation, and Charles Babbage Institute, and she is the recipient of two NSF Scholars Awards. She an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, member of the academic council of the AI Now Institute, editorial board member of Hispanic American Historical Review, and executive council member of the Society for the History of Technology. Previous appointments include serving as a Fulbright Specialist in Engineering Education and directing the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University.
Before coming to MIT, Medina taught at the Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering for fourteen years. She holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University, a Master in Studies of Law from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in the history and social study of science and technology from the MIT HASTS Program.