# The politics of face and the trouble with race: Exploring relations at the interface between the individual and the collective in forensic practice

## TL;DR

This paper explores how faces in forensic contexts reveal complex relationships between individual identity and collective racial categories, shaped by historical and cultural influences.

## Contribution

The paper introduces conceptual tools to analyze the face as both an individual and collective phenomenon, addressing the entanglement of race and visuality in forensic practice.

## Key findings

- Forensic faces mobilize collectives despite appearing to represent individual suspects.
- The face forces a reckoning with colonial histories of racial typology in physical anthropology.
- The face challenges Western regimes of visuality tied to racial categorization.

## Abstract

This special issue interrogates race through the lens of face. Its central faces are those in forensic settings. Promising immediate legibility and access to the individual suspect, forensic faces nevertheless mobilize a variety of collectives. We offer conceptual and methodological tools to examine the face as both an individual and a collective phenomenon, and demonstrate through detailed cases how the face thus allows us to address the absent presence of race. Given its long and convoluted history in physical anthropology, as a marker of racial typology, the face forces us to reckon with colonial histories of ordering human difference. But the face also allows us to question a regime of visuality that congeals around the face in Western culture. In this introduction to The Politics of Face and the Trouble with Race we elaborate these concerns and introduce the contributions to this volume.