British Association for Forensic Anthropology

We invite you to an online seminar “Differential Forensic Specialization in Biological and Social Anthropology“.

Dr James Rose is a forensic and expert social anthropologist specialising in Indigenous land, sea, and natural resource claims and negotiations, and cultural heritage protection. He is Senior Fellow with the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne, Director and Senior Consultant with the Australian firm Relational Modelling and Analysis, and a member of the Forensic Anthropology Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. James holds over two decades’ experience working as a forensic investigator and expert witness with Australian law firms, courts, government agencies and departments, community-controlled organisations, and the private sector.

About this talk

This seminar maps the developmental differentiation between the forensic specializations of biological anthropology and social anthropology. At its inception, the overarching discipline of anthropology initially conflated human physical biology and social culture, before subsequently clarifying and distinguishing its two subsidiary fields’ respective objects of study, parameters of study, and models of causality. Since formalizing this distinction, biological anthropology has progressed along a relatively consistent and integrated academic and professional biomedical trajectory, rendering it well-suited to forensic specialization. By contrast, social anthropology has taken a more convoluted developmental route towards forensics. While professionally, social anthropology has remained consistently focused on delivering social scientific expertise to community development and government administration in legally pluralistic jurisdictions, its academic trajectory has digressed into moral philosophy and literary studies. Because of the persistence of this misalignment between the professional practice and academic teaching of social anthropology the field has only recently come to formally accept its value as a source of forensic and expert evidence. This seminar focuses on two persistent points of tension in the development of forensic biological anthropology on the one hand, and forensic social anthropology on the other. One point of tension marks a lingering misunderstanding of the scientific basis of the links between social and biological anthropology generally. The other point of tension marks the more specific contradiction between the academic teaching and professional deployment of social anthropological expertise in forensic settings. This seminar sets out terms and definitions that have been developed to resolve both points of tension, and provides examples of forensic social anthropology as utilized in courts around the world, focusing on Australian case studies in particular.

Wednesday 21/10/2026, 10 a.m. BST

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