Ren Lu is a facilitator at their core. They are continuously in gratitude for all of their communities they learn and exist in, particularly through their Transformative Justice and organizing work. At Brown, they are a student coordinator for the Transformative Justice Initiative, a poet with WORD! Performance Poetry, and a co-coordinator for Brown Asian Sisters Empowered. Ren concentrates in Ethnic Studies, and is interested in migration/diaspora histories, movement building, and intergenerational connection through art and oral histories. Their work is always informed by their grandma, who they really really miss.

Project: 

It’s a simple concept: spit in a test tube, mail it out, and discover your identity within the results. The exponentially growing visibility of Direct-to-Consumer (23andMe, Ancestry.com, etc.) genetic tests presents yet another reification in the long history of conflating race with biology, an essentialist myth that began in attempts to justify chattel slavery. Through archival work, this project seeks to locate issues with modern advancements in scientific and medical technologies as part of the problematic histories of eugenics and race science. It also seeks to create a counter-archive of how people of color—especially those involved in the “objective” fields of science and medicine—have defined their racial identity for themselves.

Advisor: Lundy Braun