Leah Lowthorp

• Professor
• University of Oregon

The rise of direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing and social media technologies have converged to create a particular genre of vernacular identity performance: the genetic ancestry “reveal” on YouTube. This article seeks to understand these performances in relation to the authority that performers grant test results to inform racial and/or et...

As public interest advocates, policy experts, bioethicists, and scientists, we call for a course correction in public discussions about heritable human genome editing. Clarifying misrepresentations, centering societal consequences and concerns, and fostering public empowerment will support robust, global public engagement and meaningful deliberatio...

As public interest advocates, policy experts, bioethicists, and scientists, we call for a course correction in public discussions about heritable human genome editing. Clarifying misrepresentations, centering societal consequences and concerns, and fostering public empowerment will support robust, global public engagement and meaningful deliberatio...

Digital folklore offers unique insight into how the wider public is grappling with complex scientific developments in the world today. This paper explores the relationship between scientific hyperbole and public skepticism of scientific claims in an age of fake news, in an examination of a joke cycle, #CRISPRfacts, that emerged on Twitter in respon...

‘Mitochondrial replacement’ and ‘germline gene editing’ are relatively new techniques that represent a significant moral, technological, and legal threshold, as they would introduce permanent and heritable changes to the human gene pool. This article examines the close relationship between these two technologies over time, considering what regulato...

In recent decades, scholars of South Asian folklore have increasingly engaged the politics of folklore, interrogating its role in a number of political agendas, but less has been written about the connection within South Asian folklore studies. This study makes a national and global intervention in the relationship between folklore and the state in...

Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater of Kerala state was recognized as India's first UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Looking back a decade later, how has UNESCO recognition impacted both the art and the lives of its artists? Based upon two years of ethnographic research from 2008-10 among Kutiyattam artists in Ker...

This article explores the emergence and swift decline of the Kerryman joke, a late modern fool region joke told by the Irish about their fellow countrymen from the south-westernmost county of Kerry. It both contextualizes the joke cycle within a rapidly modernizing, latetwentieth century Ireland, and examines tensions between the emic interpretatio...

In an ethnographic exploration of Kutiyattam theatre of Kerala, India, this dissertation broadly examines how changes in cultural practice reflect wider social and political changes over time, particularly as implicated in a universalizing modernity and shifting constellations of cosmopolitanism. It charts how changes in Kutiyattam's form and pract...