ranslating Twins: Twin Research and the Production of Genetic Knowledge in the Swedish Welfare State

Alison Cool is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at New York University. She is currently writing her dissertation based on ethnographic fieldwork of innovative twin studies of social and economic behavior in Stockholm, Sweden, which is home to the world’s largest register of twins for medical and scientific research. Her project looks at how Swedish scientists in different disciplinary settings, including behavioral genetics, psychology, and economics, instrumentalize concepts of genes and environments throughout the development and execution of experiments and statistical analyses of twins and twin data. Her work focuses on the processes by which scientific research comes to transcend its regional and national origins in data based on a Swedish population and investigated by Swedish scientists and transforms into general knowledge about universal forms of behavior in humans. She has received funding for this project from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright IIE Program. During her stay at the Brocher Foundation, she will be working on writing her PhD dissertation.