Lunch Lecture - Veronika Lipphardt & Peter Pfaffelhuber

In human population genetics, so-called isolated populations have recently attracted much attention. Next to Finns, Basques, Icelanders, Sardinians and village populations in the Alpes, Roma have been studied by population geneticists under the premises that they are of Indian origin, and that they have been isolated ever since their arrival in Europe by endogamy. Starting from these assumptions, more than 150 studies have described Roma as a population that differs genetically from European populations.

The academic field of Science Studies, firmly rooted in the humanities and social sciences, allows for investigating how researchers (e.g. population geneticists) address their research object (e.g. isolated populations). However, for fully understanding the societal implications of said genetic studies, as well as for a comprehensive understanding of the populations, one needs to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach, and employ both qualitative and quantitative methods. In our presentation, we explain how we, as a multidisciplinary team, bring these diverse sets of methods together to achieve synergetic effects. Furthermore, we argue that research teams studying isolated populations should likewise draw on a well designed mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, if they wish to avoid tautologies and other problematic impacts on their results.