“Social genomics” is a 21st-century research program applying genetic data to social science questions. I narrate the development of this field, from the 1990s to the present, through its data practices: how scientists disclose, enclose, abstract and synthesize data. Previous analyses of social genomics have focused on how and to what effect this research “geneticizes” social phenomena, suborning them to biological discourses. This data-centric history, however, reveals how scientific social movements endemic to the social sciences have re-made genomic data, with important implications for which groups and institutions govern contemporary science.

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Bennett McIntosh is a Ph.D. candidate studying the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research examines how data practices and data infrastructure mediate contemporary scientific controversies, and draws on oral histories, ethnographic participant-observation, and quantitative methods. In addition to his dissertation on social genomics, he has studied the politics of open data and reanalysis in environmental regulation. Bennett has also worked as a journalist and science communicator, and holds degrees in science writing and in chemistry.

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