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Confronting eugenics legacies worldwide with student scholarship

21 January 2025, 4:00 pm–5:30 pm

students

Eugenics legacies at higher education (HE) institutions across the globe have only been confronted due to the power of student activism to push for acknowledgement and change. Join us for a free event where we hear from UCL and Yale students who are actively working on projects that address their institutions eugenics legacies.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Cost

Free

Organiser

UCL Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP)

Tuesday 21 January 2025, 16:00-17:30 UK time {11:00 EST} (online)

The event will bring together students, academics, and researchers to discuss the historical and contemporary impacts of eugenics on higher education institutions and efforts to address the harm of these legacies. 

Event contents

This unique discussion between students working in different continents but with shared purpose, will share vital insights from their activities including how different approaches to innovative positive action has addressed harmful instituitional legacies. 

Attend for an understanding of what students have learnt from exploring their own institutions legacies and the lessons for higher education institutions including leadership teams. The students will share insights into their own action and research in a session that will be of interest to a wide audience including educationalists, historians and academic staff more broadly concerned with how to teach "difficult histories" and professional staff working in equality and diversity. 

UCL's Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) is working with the UCL community to develop the teaching provision of our history and critical analysis of eugenics. This project follow-ups on the education-related recommendations from UCL's Eugenics Inquiry

The Yale University Anti Eugenics Collective have been working to make sure that these harmful legacies are neither forgotten or ignored. Their work also links in the modern day and implications for health, education and society broader than the university campus. 

Yale’s project called ‘Eugenics and its Afterlives’ is an ongoing examination of the history and legacies of eugenics research and advocacy at Yale University, which hosted the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s and 1930s. 

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 Speakers

Havva Görkem Altunbas

Doctoral Researcher, UCL at UCL

Görkem is a PhD candidate at the Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment (IoE).

More about Havva Görkem Altunbas

Alma Ionescu

Doctoral researcher at UCL

Alma is a PhD candidate in the UCL Institute for Global Health (IGH) who is working with ELEP in 2024/25.

More about Alma Ionescu

Shodona Kettle

Doctoral researcher at UCL

Shodona is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of the Americas and is working with ELEP in 2024/25.

More about Shodona Kettle

Tara Bhat

Student at Yale University

Tara is a student at Yale University.

Mayah Monthrope

Student at Yale University

Mayah is a student at Yale University. She is a senior majoring in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health.

Modupe Karimi

at Yale University

Modupe is a student at Yale University.

Tenzin Dhondhup

at Yale University

Tenzin is an Undergraduate Associate at the Yale School of Medicine.