Transcripts

Having difficult conversations… about starting conversations

Professor Joe Cain, Professor of History and Philosophy of Biology, PiP Academic Lead

Having a difficult conversation is about spotting those issues and asking ourselves – how do we raise that? How do we raise these things with people that we work with every day? How do we raise them with people who come in and we only have a brief encounter with? How do we raise it with our family? I mean, everyone has stories about people in their family who display uncomfortable views. How do we talk about that at a holiday celebration? In a way that doesn’t give offense, but perhaps moves the conversation forward in a way that checks that bias one way or another?

Having difficult conversations is a set of skills and having difficult conversations is something all of us will do across our whole professional career. And so learning that as a skill is as important as learning a new kind of software, or learning a presentation skill, or learning how to dance. So what I really like about the legacies of eugenics conversation is its provoked the institution to move larger, to move to a larger conversation, we talk about prejudices in power and we talk about having difficult conversations.

Having difficult conversations… about conversations already happening

Soul Miles, Facilitator of Co-creation project And Salt the Earth Behind: Designerly Violence and the Eugenic Archive

Other difficult conversations that we should be having it depends who we are.

I think a lot of these conversations are already happening and we should we should listen and we should maybe, only maybe get involved.

People like Ramon Amaro at UCL talking about the consequences of, the complication of race and technology I think that's really important, and we should listen. People like Donna Haraway, talking about the capacity for animals to suffer. I think that's really important. People like Lovelock talking about a graceful end to humanity. I think that's important to listen to.

And yeah, I think these conversations are happening already, and we need to amplify them and engage with them.

Having difficult conversations… about learning to ‘disagree well’

Tor Wright, Project Manager, Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP)

We don’t want a homogenous group, it would be boring. What would we learn? And so I think there’s a move towards thinking about the disagreeing well, how we do that as a society, how we do that as a university.

And the Eugenics Legacy Education Project is looking at ways to help support academics in teaching difficult and sensitive topics. So we do things like training sessions, we’ll do research and we’ll look at different theories behind how these things happen. Something that we all say – don’t just have a debate. You know a debate is black and white, there’s a yes or no, you’re right, you’re wrong. That’s not always the way to look at difficult topics.
You need to engage with them sensitively. You need to prepare students, because it’s difficult, because it could be triggering for some people. You don’t understand the histories of all your students. People come from different worlds, so we have to be conscious and sensitive that we are not all the same. We don’t all have the same viewpoint, and even the academic has to understand that their viewpoint might not be right or, you know, it might not be understood.

We need to think – how do we engage with these students? How do we get them to become critical thinkers that can look at these wider topics and not just be offended, or not just toe the UCL line, but think independently.

Having difficult conversations…about who is marginalised in society

Subhadra Das, Curator of UCL Science Collections 2012-2021

For students of colour, for staff of colour at the university, these difficult conversations are our lived reality, and so we don’t get the choice as to whether we have them or not. So many of the conversations that we have in our society today about people and how their identities are marginalised, or how they are marginalised by dint of their identity, feeds back into those early 20th century ways of looking at the world. And our ideas of who is normal, who gets to say what is normal, who is in power and who gets to say how the rest of us live, are really bound up in all of this eugenic thinking.

Because this is a history that is much bigger than we thought it was and it’s a history that never went away. This is upsetting history, this is disconcerting history. Some of us will find it more disconcerting than others and some of us, in the course of our daily lives, don’t have the choice as to whether we face it or not.

Having difficult conversations about…Global Oppression

Lila Brustad, Facilitator of Co-creation project The Digital Legacy of Eugenics

Difficult conversations that UCL should be having is how are we going to work towards freedom for Palestinians?

How are we going to uplift oppressed people around the world?

And how is the research that we are doing as an academic institution possibly contributing to oppression of different people globally?

Having difficult conversations about…History

Dr Adam Rutherford, Lecturer in Biology and Society, UCL

If we don't have difficult conversations about that history, and why UCL and society and science in particular, as far as I'm concerned, are the way that they are today because of that, of their history, then we are not being academically honest.

And that doesn't just apply to eugenics. It applies to scientific racism, which was normalised in the 19th and early 20th century and is as much a part of UCL's history as anything else.

History is not there to make us feel warm and comfortable, and if you do feel warm and comfortable about the history that you're studying, it may be that you're not doing history at all.

There should be no easy questions. All the questions we ask of our history should be difficult ones, whether we're talking about colonialism or scientific racism or eugenics. These are part of the history of UCL of London, of the UK, of the West. If you want to engage with any of these, any academic topic, then all of these things are relevant.

And to be honest, it's not just in genetics where eugenics has a very clear link and it's not just in history. If you're studying the history of empire or the study of Europe, which includes empire and includes scientific racism, every subject is rooted in the history of the West, where these types of ideas are part of it.

Eugenics and…New Technology

Joanna Baines, Academic Liaison Librarian/Archivist, UCL Special Collections

What we talk about in terms of difficult conversations is constantly changing. But one of the things that I'm reflecting on quite a lot is that one of the key things that came out of the eugenics legacy, if you like, was Carl Pearson in particular, had a real drive to create a new discipline which was using statistics to make to make decisions and inform policy and inform how we thought about the world using this data.

And Pearson really drove this idea, as far as I can tell, that this discipline was new. And in universities we like new, we like shiny, we like exciting. And I think there are things coming out in the world at the moment, particularly things like artificial intelligence where we’re very, very keen to go “oh yes, we need to be on this bandwagon, we need to get on board with this.”

But we haven't quite thought through the other wider implications of it.

Eugenics and…Education

Jess Starns, Facilitator of Co-creation project Framing Inclusion: AI Art Response to Burt’s Educational Standards

Many difficult conversations that we have today and that we probably have in the future, are heavily embedded in eugenics.

So I think one of the situations happening for children and young people at the moment that has had an impact in eugenics is young people who are disengaging with school and asking why they're disengaging in the school, and how to support children and young people to enjoy education and to help them stay in school.

It was quite emotionally hard to look through all the items in the archive, and also reflect back on my school and how I guess eugenics has impacted my experience of school because I didn't have a great school journey. And how, it's become clearer in my mind how eugenics has impacted school education in the past, but also today.

Eugenics and…Gender

Aleks Jagielski, Facilitator of Co-creation project Transgender Lives and Eugenics in the Museum Space

When people think about eugenics they mostly think about race. But also, we were trying to, the perspective we were trying to bring in is to show how gender plays a role.

And obviously race and gender are connected. But in the current transphobic climate in the UK, we thought it was particularly important to do this project to show how eugenic thinking has influenced the kind of transphobic narrative present in the UK and the kind of TERF ideologies as well, because those two cannot be separated.

So we were dealing with this racist, transphobic legacy of eugenics at UCL that we saw in the archive. But what we actually wanted was to make a safe space, and in that, be able to make something fun out of this legacy, to create an output that would be engaging, educational, interesting, fun, colourful, something that brings the community together.

During the presentation and the workshop, so we got quite deep, like thinking about how deep this legacy of eugenics goes and how deep it influenced people's thinking. It's here and it's there, and it's in the way we catalogue things in an archive, and it's in the way we look at people's bodies and the comments we make on people's bodies as well.

So it was really interesting to hear those responses and that people were really getting what we were saying.

Eugenics and... Inequalities and Decolonising

Nazlin Bhimani, Research Support and Special Collections Librarian, UCL

Other critical but challenging conversations we need to engage with include climate change, particularly in connection with economic disparities between the rich and poor nations, disability rights and ongoing exclusions of children, gender based violence, reproductive rights, economic and social inequalities. And also, dare I say it, the rise of fascism.

But more importantly, I think it's necessary to talk about decolonising the teaching and the research that takes place at the University.