Humanitarian Forensics: A conference, workshop, and resource fair

Check in and enjoy coffee and breakfast before the conference begins. Welcome and opening remarks begin at 8:45 a.m.; registration remains open until 9 a.m.

Location

CLCC breezeway; located on the east side of CLCC

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Description
Community-based work, be it domestic or international, is foundational to anthropological practice. Examples of collaboration abound in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, as well as in contemporary archaeological practice. A growing number of subfields within biological anthropology are drawing on community-based participatory research (CBPR) models; for example, human biologists draw from CBPR frameworks to address health disparity and bioarchaeologists engage with communities of descent in applied and research contexts. Whereas the field of anthropology is focused on collaborative engagement and the public, American forensic anthropology has held itself apart. Inspired by the holistic practice of forensic anthropology outside the US and the vocal community members with whom we engage, this panel explores innovation and collaboration among forensic anthropologists and the diverse communities they serve. In doing so, we aim to move toward a contemporary, collaborative forensic practice, which positions the anthropologist as a facilitator and bridge between community and the medicolegal system. Panelists will discuss topics including: building equity and transparency in domestic missing and unidentified investigations in Chicago, IL, Mississippi, and Hawaiʻi, Operation UNITED and its novel approach for pursuing identification of unknown individuals in Wayne County, MI, and sustainable capacity building in humanitarian forensic work in Somaliland. Upon leaving this panel, participants and panelists will collectively envision best practices and approaches for community-oriented forensic anthropology practice.

Presenters and paper authors

“Bridging the Divide: Community Forensic Anthropology in Hawaiʻi”
Ariel Gruenthal-Rankin (University of Hawai'i- West O'ahu)

“Negotiating Humanitarian Forensics in the United States: Operation UNITED and the Unidentified Dead”
Jaymelee J. Kim (Wayne State University)

“Finding the Missing Together: Community-Engaged Forensic Work in Rural Mississippi” 
Jesse Goliath (Mississippi State University)

“Stakeholder Perspectives in Chicago's Missing Persons Infrastructure: A Community-Centered Approach to DNA Reference Sample Collection and Documentation” 
Abigail Houkes (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

“Building Sustainable Forensic Capacity: State of Community Forensics in Somaliland and Ways Forward”
Lucia Elgerud (Uppsala University)
Guleid Mohamed Hassan (Somaliland War Crimes Investigation Commission)

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Location

SANDS 101

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Description
This panel foregrounds the role of geography and cartography in a forensic humanitarian approach to migrant border crossing death in the U.S. southwest: visualizing the scale of death, analyzing its geographic patterns and trends, and intervening in the facing of missing and inaccurate documentation. While some geographic analysis has come from government agencies with authority over death investigations, much of these efforts have come from outside of government. This reveals the possibilities and complexities of civil society partnerships with death investigators in humanitarian contexts, or sometimes the need for a “counterforensic” approach—in which civil society groups adapt the scientific investigatory tools that are traditionally fall under the auspices of state regulatory authority as a means to shed light on state-sanctioned violence. Finally, the panel offers insight on how geography and cartographic analysis can be vital to the fulfillment of the humanitarian aspects of death investigations in the face of the slow-moving mass casualty event facing this border region.

Presenters and paper authors

“US-Mexico Migrant Death Database”
Bryce Peterson (No More Deaths)

“The Migrant Caseload at the Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI), Albuquerque, New Mexico”
Heather Edgar (University of New Mexico)

“Deaths by Exposure as a Function of Border Policy”
Samuel Norton Chambers (Arizona State University)

“South Texas Geographies of Dispossession, Death, and Resistance” 
Caroline Tracey

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Location

CLCC 180

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Description
Humanitarian forensic science is undergoing profound change as practitioners navigate the intersecting demands of scientific rigor, humanitarian principles, legal accountability, public engagement, and technological innovation. As the field expands beyond the laboratory, forensic practitioners increasingly confront questions about neutrality, ethics, and the broader social and political contexts in which they work. This panel explores how humanitarian forensics is adapting to these evolving challenges. Together, the presentations examine the conceptual foundations of humanitarian forensic practice, the influence of changing legal and public environments on forensic work, and the opportunities and ethical considerations associated with emerging technologies. Collectively, they highlight humanitarian forensics as a dynamic field shaped not only by advances in science but also by ongoing negotiations among humanitarian values, accountability, community engagement, and innovation. In doing so, the panel offers a timely reflection on the future of humanitarian forensic practice and its continuing commitment to truth, identification, and justice for missing persons and their families

Presenters and paper authors

“Five questions for Humanitarian Forensics”
Andreas Kleiser (International Commission on Missing Persons)

“In the Court of Public Opinion: Digital interactions between the public and forensic anthropologists at the US-Mexico border”
Kaitlyn Glavee (Wayne State University)
Ella Uren (University of Indianapolis)
Lillian Bucher (University of Indianapolis)

“The Migrant Mortality Mapping Portal Project (M3P2): Functionalities and Findings”
Alberto Giordano (Texas State University)

“Technological Integration in Forensic Science: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR)” 
JP Baraybar (International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC))
Pierre Francois (Institut National de Sciences Appliques, Lyon-France)
Victor Mireles (Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM)
Bassem Khalil (International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC))

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Location

SANDS 201

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Description
Sponsored by APPEX - US NSF Center for Analysis and Prediction of Pandemic Expansion

This roundtable approaches the complex systems of fatality management during pandemics, with such events demanding a multiscalar approach in the face of an interconnected social and medical emergency. These events overwhelm existing deathcare systems, creating logistical challenges such as lack of storage, lack of personnel, implementation of new policies to ensure safe handling of remains and protection of practitioners, or delays in obtaining necessary equipment. In addition to the medical emergency portion of a pandemic, there is a rippling effect throughout larger communities and loved ones of the deceased. Pandemics can alter cultural systems through the disruption to burial rituals, prolonged and uncertain mourning, and challenges surrounding memorialization. Bridging these conflicting priorities are issues of tracking, reporting, and disseminating vital information. Logistically, there may be differences in how healthcare systems track information compared to existing Medical Examiner and coroner systems. Socially and culturally, communicating this information to the public needs to minimize misinformation and confusion. This roundtable seeks to draw upon the lessons learned through practitioner experience during the recent Covid-19 pandemic, both within the US and abroad, to promote paths forward that can simultaneously address these often conflicting priorities of public health and deathcare systems and the larger social, cultural, and emotional impacts of these mass fatality events.  

Speakers

Sarah Wagner (George Washington University)
Jessica Gould (MI-MORT)
Oran Finegan (Forensic Action International)
Ruth Toulson (Johns Hopkins University)
Nina Fefferman (Arizona State University)
Djordje Alempijevic (University of Belgrade)
Moderator: Sara Fatula (Arizona State University)

Location

SANDS 211

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Description
The need for forensic human rights and humanitarian action is growing every year, yet the geopolitical landscape has steadily moved away from supporting or even tolerating forensic inquiries. Moreover, more humanitarian requests are now bottom up - requested by communities rather than states - which ideally involves a nuanced, though no less scientific, response. What is needed to meet these evolving needs, and what responsibilities do universities have to prepare students for future investigative actions? The goal of this presentation is to lead a discussion about what synergistic training opportunities colleges and universities should be providing to future forensic humanitarian workers, not just in the sciences but across the humanities as well.

Speaker

Dawnie Wolf Steadman
Professor of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Location

CLCC 299

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Description
In this second roundtable, practitioners and researchers will address broader themes provoked by the discussion of the disappearance of the Colibrí database/archive. To begin with, its unaccounted-for absence raises complex, thorny questions of proprietorship: Who owns the genetic and archival data that correspond to individual human lives, both the unnamed deceased and the surviving kin who seek their return? What does such “ownership” entail, specifically related to obligations to maintain and protect the integrity of the data and, by extension, the lives indexed by those data? Is such protection inherently tied to state systems of medico-legal governance? While in many instances the state produces and preserves genetic and archival data, it is precisely in the case of the unwanted, the marginalized, or purposely disappeared that the state reveals its interests. For example, the Colibrí database/archive case illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of non-state actors and practices in the wider field of accounting for missing persons, particularly in contexts where citizenship and sovereignty structure whose lives are recognized as grievable, searchable, and legally knowable.

The roundtable therefore also considers what arises in the gaps and shadows of state negligence. Citizen science initiatives, family-led archives, activist databases, and forms of vernacular forensics have often emerged precisely where state institutions have failed, refused, or proven unable to account for the missing. Such practices can generate alternative infrastructures of care, transnational collaboration, and evidentiary knowledge that challenge official regimes of visibility and neglect. They may also create new forms of participation for families and communities historically excluded from medico-legal processes. In those cases, vulnerabilities and contradictions unavoidably accompany these forms of extra-state forensic labour as non-state initiatives frequently operate under conditions of financial precarity, uneven governance, and limited accountability, while simultaneously managing highly sensitive biological, archival, and affective data. Their legitimacy may depend upon borrowing the authority of state forensic systems even as they seek to supplement or critique them. Moreover, vernacular and citizen-led forensic practices can reproduce some of the same classificatory logics, hierarchies of recognition, and biotechnical assumptions that characterize formal medico-legal institutions. Additional examples of citizen science and vernacular forensics from different geopolitical contexts will help illuminate how these initiatives variously negotiate questions of care, expertise, sovereignty, and responsibility. 

Finally, the missing Colibrí database also invites a longer historical and philosophical view of why names (and why bones) matter. Does it matter from whence such mattering arises? To what extent is the twenty-first-century project of naming the unidentified dead through forensic genetics an exercise in reinscribing biotechnical forms of personhood onto social relations and forms of belonging that may resist individuation? The roundtable will also consider how the imperative to restore names to remains has come to shape contemporary practices of memoralization, humanitarianism, and political recognition across a range of socio-political contexts. 

Speakers

Sarah Wagner (George Washington University)
Tam Ngo (NIOD Institute for War and Genocide Studies)
Nick Passalacqua (The Ohio State University)
Marni LaFleur (University of San Diego)
Derek Congram (The Ohio State University)
Tom Holland (Middle Tennessee State University)
Simon Robins (International Committee of the Red Cross)

Location

SANDS 101

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Check in and enjoy coffee and breakfast before day two of the conference begins. 

Location

SANDS Courtyard (between SANDS building and KIVA lecture hall)

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Description
Individuals who die or disappear in humanitarian crises remain unidentified, leaving families without answers and communities without resolution for decades. In complex humanitarian contexts, such as post-conflict regions, migration corridors, and legally underregulated environments, identification efforts face compounding challenges. These challenges include but are not limited to scarcity of antemortem records, lack of legal frameworks governing the dead, eroded institutional trust by decades of violence, and families interfacing with forensic processes for the first time. Standard identification pipelines were not designed for these conditions, and applying them without adaptation risks both scientific failure and community harm. 

This panel brings together practitioners and researchers working across four unique contexts to examine how personal identification can be conducted responsibly and effectively when forensic infrastructure is limited and community trust is absent. Drawing on active caseswork in Sri Lanka, the Republic of Georgia, and the US-Mexico border, presenters address the full arc of the identification problem: building postmortem profiles in the absence of antemortem documentation, engaging families who have minimal trust in government institutions, like the forensic system, operating within legal vacuums, and embedding identification work within broader institutional capacity-building efforts. 

Across these contexts, a common set of challenges emerges alongside transferable solutions. Presenters propose frameworks for community-centered identification, first-contact family communication, legally adaptive practice, international collaboration mechanisms, and sustainable national capacity development. Together, these papers argue that effective humanitarian personal identification requires not only scientific rigor but structural flexibility and a genuine commitment to the communities forensic practitioners serve. By convening practitioners across regions and contexts, this panel creates a rare opportunity for dialogue and the exchange of lessons that transcend any single case or country.

Presenters and paper authors

“ICRC Humanitarian Forensic Action in Sri Lanka”
Yarimar Cristina Ruiz Orozco (International Committee of the Red Cross)

“Adaptation in the Absence of Systems: Forensic Practice in Soviet-Era Mass Graves in Georgia” 
Meri Gonashvili (Tbilisi State Medical University)

“Beyond Antemortem Records: A Proposed Identification Framework for Post-Conflict Sri Lanka”
Selliah Pranavan (University of Jaffna) 

“System Breakdowns: Addressing Challenges to the Identification of Migrant Remains in Texas through Civil Society”
Kate Spradley (Texas State University)

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Location

SANDS 201

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Description
How does disappearance become representable? This panel examines the processes — semiotic, affective, institutional, and ritual — through which absent bodies are rendered publicly legible within contemporary humanitarian regimes. Bringing together perspectives from visual politics, material culture studies, and humanitarian practice, the papers ask how certain objects, images, and representational forms come to stand in for those who cannot be seen. Central to the panel is an attention to the labor this visibility requires — the work of translation across material, cosmological, legal, and media registers — and to the political effects such labor produces. Rather than treating humanitarian representation as a transparent medium of witnessing, the panel approaches it as a historically situated field of practice in which specific visual grammars and material forms are produced, stabilized, and put into circulation. 

The papers examine how these forms acquire moral authority, how they become representatives of the phenomenon, how they navigate the tension between individual lives and anonymous mass death, and what kinds of claims — political, devotional, legal, familial — they enable or foreclose. Particular attention is paid to the role of material substitutes for the absent body: fragments, the photographs of the photographs, surrogate objects, and devotional artifacts through which disappearance is transformed into something that can be mourned, commemorated, and politically contested. The panel contributes to a broader anthropology of humanitarian visibility — one attentive to the power relations embedded in the act of making loss legible, and to the unexpected cosmological, aesthetic, and institutional forces that shape who and what can be grieved.

Presenters and paper authors

“Visual Representations of the Missing”
Jessica Auchter (Université Laval) and Simon Robins (International Committee of the Red Cross)

“‘Am I not here?’: On Divine Apparition and Forced Disappearance”
Cate Morley (Princeton University)

“From Debris to Relic: Boat Fragments and Catholic Cosmologies in the Making of Migrant Sacredness at the Mediterranean Border”
Giorgia Mirto (Columbia University)

“Public Symbols, Private Paperwork: Figuring Ireland's Missing Dead”
Phoebe Grace Whiteside (Columbia University)

“Knowing the Invisible: Competing Regimes of Truth and Im/possible Forms of Justice Across the Mediterranean Border”
Giulia Sezzi (Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa)

Discussant: Myriam Fotou (University of Leicester) 

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Location

SANDS 135

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Description
This speaker panel will explore the historical and ongoing treatment of Indigenous bodies within anthropological, forensic, and medicolegal systems. Indigenous peoples have long experienced the collection and scientific exploitation of their ancestors through colonial institutions such as museums, universities, and state agencies. Although the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) marked an important shift toward repatriation of ancestors and culturally significant items, Indigenous remains/ancestors continue to exist within systems shaped by colonialism and resulting inequitable justice systems.

Bringing together perspectives from academics, advocates, tribes, medicolegal systems, and forensic sciences, this speaker series explores how colonial frameworks continue to shape the identification and governance of Indigenous remains/ancestors and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) cases. Topics include changing perspectives on ancestral remains, barriers to identifying Indigenous decedents, ancestry estimation and racialization, and tensions between scientific authority and Tribal sovereignty. A key outcome of the speakers panel will be the development of recommendations for improving the identification and return of Native American decedents through NAGPRA and medicolegal systems, including stronger Tribal consultation, improved awareness of emerging methods, interagency collaboration, culturally informed forensic practices, and greater Tribal involvement in forensic decision-making. This session centers Indigenous bodies not as scientific objects, but as ancestors and relatives connected to ongoing experiences of survivance, resistance, and justice.

Presenters and paper authors

“Academics don’t know what academics don’t know: and other lessons learned from tribal communities”
Marni LaFleur (University of San Diego) 

“Advancing Indigenous Data Sovereignty in Forensic Anthropology Research and Methods: A Cross-Disciplinary Review”
Arielle Y. Reich (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Title TBD
Valaura Imus-Nahsonhoya (Arizona’s Governor’s Office of Tribal Relations)

“Forensic or Ancestral: How modern laws, Western science, and traditional knowledge define engagement with Native American remains”
Aaron Young (NAGPRA Manager, University of San Diego)

Title TBD
Juan Sanchez (Pechanga Tribal Ranger) 

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Location

SANDS 211

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Description
Across contexts of conflict, political violence, and humanitarian crisis, disappearance leaves families and communities navigating uncertainty, grief, and the enduring search for answers. This panel explores the human dimensions of disappearance beyond the technical processes of recovery and identification, examining how families, communities, and institutions engage with memory, truth-seeking, accountability, and repair.

Drawing on case studies from diverse regions, presenters consider the social, cultural, and political consequences of disappearance, the experiences of those living with unresolved loss, and the role of humanitarian and forensic initiatives in supporting dignity, recognition, and justice. Together, these papers highlight how memory and family perspectives shape responses to disappearance and contribute to broader efforts to address its long-term impacts.

Presenters and paper authors

“The International Law on Right to Know the Truth” 
Haifa Haifa Peerzada (Jindal Global Law School) 

“From Disappearance to Documentation: Community-Driven Humanitarian Forensics In Kashmir”
Rohi Jehan (University of Manchester) 

“Justice Beyond the State: Enforced Disappearances and Accountability in Kashmir and Punjab”
Asaf Lone (Australian National University) 

“Rippled Waters: Ex-combatants, Forensic Humanitarian Action, and the Missing in Colombia”
William Daniel Cawley (Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis (SAU)  

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Location

SANDS 202

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Location

Verde Dining Pavilion (VDP)

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Description
Nepantla, the Nahuatl root word meaning “the middle” or “in between,” is central to Nahua philosophy and has been applied to contemporary scholarship as a means of intersectional understanding in liminal spaces. Nepantla names the state of existential transition, suspension, and boundary-crossing produced when two worlds collide and a person is absorbed by neither, occupying both liminal spaces. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's theorization of nepantla—the site of in-betweenness and uncertainty that creates los atravesados through structural exclusion and from which creative transformation is brought about by those who choose to inhabit it, las nepantleras—the proposed roundtable hopes to further develop these concepts through their application to humanitarian forensic action work. Roundtable participants will explore how forensic practitioners, predominantly based in Texas, navigate structurally unresolved spaces, including those between the living and the dead, the missing and the unidentified, state institutions and humanitarian obligations, and scientific objectivity and personal subjectivity, to build bridges and walk the middle path. Through intimate ethnography that validates the emotional and subjective as tools for rigorous scholarly inquiry, roundtable participants will weave personal narrative with theoretical reflection. The session, moderated by Dr. Jesús Villa, invites audience engagement and aims to collectively develop nepantla as a conceptual framework within forensics —one capable of naming and, potentially, transforming the unique pressures faced by those who do this work in Texas and beyond.

Speakers

Navit Nachmias (Texas State University)
Courtney C. Siegert (Texas State University)
Daniela Martinez Herrera (University of Arizona)
Victoria Soto (Texas State University)
Kari Helgeson (Texas State University)
Veronica Flores-Guillen (Texas State University)
Moderator: Jesús C. Villa (Arizona State University) 

Location

KIVA Lecture Hall

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