Add Eugenics and Stir: Top Tips For Introducing Eugenics as a Teaching Subject, 14 Mar (in-person)
14 March 2024, 2:00 pm–3:00 pm
This timely in-person event coincides with a major expansion of awareness from staff and students of harmful legacies such as UCL's eugenics association. Attend to start thinking about how you might address eugenics in your curriculums.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
UCL Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP)
Location
-
UCL Careers 4th Floor Seminar RoomUCL Careers40 Bernard StreetLondonWC1N 1LEUnited Kingdom
Thursday 14th March 2024, 14:00-15:00 (in-person)
Join us from 13:30 for tea, coffee and biscuits at the UCL Careers 4th Floor Seminar Room, 40 Bernard Street, London, WC1N 1LE.
For many years eugenics and its legacies have been niche subjects in the “science and society” parts of our curriculum. We have seen recently a major expansion of awareness from students and a hunger to do more with their knowledge. We also have seen keen interest from colleagues who want to expand their attention to these “difficult subjects”.
How best to fit them into a packed curriculum? How best to make them serve pedagogical and affective ends? This session will be part advisory, part provocation, and part dialogue.
We’ll map some of the subject material. We’ll highlight some useful pivot points. We’ll give attendees some space to think aloud about wants and needs, ambitions and fears, potentials and restrictions. If nothing else, you’ll walk away with some top tips for making a few more steps forward. If the session goes as hoped, you’ll walk away with much more.
Event background
The event is organised by UCL’s Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP), a programme of education activity to help address UCL's harmful historical links to eugenics.
ELEP is theoretically anchored within the field of difficult knowledge studies. Britzman (1998) developed the concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ to investigate the ways that experiences of education and learning can be problematic, uncomfortable, and even harmful when encountering complex curriculum areas. ELEP supports educational projects that encourage engagement with core issues in social justice-oriented approaches to education, such as difficult knowledge.
About the Speaker
Joe Cain
Professor of History and Philosophy of Biology at UCL
Professor Joe Cain is a historian and philosopher of biology. He served on the original UCL Eugenics Inquiry and helped create the MORE report. He led the provost-funded ‘Legacies of Eugenics’ project at UCL (2020-22). He teaches history of eugenics, evolution, and related subjects (e.g., HPSC0070 and HPSC0023) in UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Joe also is a former head of department and now serves as STS Director of Education and Student Experience. He is academic lead for an upcoming (2025) exhibition in the Octagon Gallery on legacies of eugenics.
More about Joe Cain