Add Eugenics and Stir: Top Tips For Introducing Eugenics as a Teaching Subject, 14 Mar (in-person)

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.