L'eugénime et l'académique

Eugenics in the Academy

Workshop

 

Oxford on Friday 10th May.



In summer 2020, memorials to prominent eugenicists Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher were removed from campuses in London and Cambridge, as campaigners pressured universities to address their historical entanglements with the eugenics movement. Eugenics is the project of improving the genetic ‘quality’ of human populations by controlling who is and is not able to reproduce. Today, it is widely derided as dangerous ‘pseudoscience’. But this was not always so. In Britain, the birthplace of the movement, eugenics once boasted the status and infrastructure of a bona fide science, with lavishly funded university departments and laboratories, dedicated learned societies, and specialist scholarly journals. This workshop will reckon with these histories. Through case-studies ranging from UCL's Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, to Oxford's short-lived (and little-studied) Anthropometric Laboratory, contributions will ask how elite institutions of teaching and research have historically helped to establish and sustain eugenics. We will also be concerned with the afterlives of eugenics in the academy. How were eugenic academic networks and infrastructure dismantled or otherwise transformed following the Second World War, when the movement’s popularity and visibility waned? Some institutions have already begun the urgent work of confronting their historical entanglements with eugenics – e.g., through curricular reform, commissioned research, exhibitions and outreach activities, as well as through processes of renaming and denaming. This workshop will provide an opportunity to reflect critically upon these initiatives, and to consider how institutions might do better going forward.



PROGRAMME

Faculty of History, George Street, Oxford, OX1 2RL


11:20-11:40 Arrival & Registration with Coffee/tea (Joan Thirsk Common Room)

11:40-11:45 Welcome (Rees Davies Room)

11:45-13:15 Panel I – Eugenics in London (Rees Davies Room)

Kiera Evans (University of Reading), ‘Francis Galton’s Eugenics and the Royal Society, 1860–1911’

Joe Cain (University College London), ‘Why Invest in Eugenics? The Case of University of London’

Maria Kiladi (University College London), ‘Lionel Penrose and the End of Eugenics at UCL’

13:15-14:00 Lunch (Joan Thirsk Common Room)

14:00-15:00 Panel II – Eugenics at Oxbridge (Rees Davies Room)

Alex Aylward (University of Oxford), ‘Reproducing the Oxbridge Man’

Ross Brooks (Oxford Brookes University), ‘“Doctrines Repugnant Alike to God and Man”: Resisting Eugenics at Oxford’


15:00-15:20 Coffee/Tea (Joan Thirsk Common Room)


15:20-17:00 Panel III – Legacies (Rees Davies Room)

Coreen McGuire (Durham University), ‘Eugenics and Disability: Entanglements and Afterlives’

Roundtable Discussion with: Indy Bhullar (London School of Economics), Joe Cain (University College London), Debbie Challis (The Manchester Portico Library/University of Liverpool), Paula Larsson (Uncomfortable Cities), and Marius Turda (Oxford Brookes University)


17:00-18:00 Keynote Lecture (History Faculty Lecture Theatre & Online)

Subhadra Das, ‘It Takes a University: Towards Critical Eugenics in the Academy’




With thanks to the Faculty of History, the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, and the British Society for the History of Science, for their generous support.



Registration is via the event webpage. Can't come for the whole day? You can register for the closing keynote lecture only, with options to attend in-person or online. In-person capacity for both the workshop and keynote lecture are limited, so register soon to reserve your place!