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Staff and students in the UCL community are engaging with the institution’s eugenics legacy in positive and creative ways. Discover their stories paired with our striking artwork.
On this page: Story 5 - From the ground up – the role of students in anti-eugenics work | Meet the artists
Other content: Story 1 | Story 2 | Story 3 | Story 4
Story 5 - From the ground up – the role of students in anti-eugenics work
ELEP has shown that students can play a key role in addressing harmful legacies in big institutions. How have bottom-up communications and other initiatives helped with engagement at UCL?
(Main illustration by Weihong ‘Clover’ Tang.)
In January 2021, UCL issued a formal public apology for its history and legacy of eugenics. UCL's Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL made several recommendations, including the creation of the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP), a project to develop the teaching provision of our history and critical analysis of eugenics.
ELEP has engaged, where possible, with UCL’s 18,000 staff and 51,000 students around the legacy, but the small team of three has had to acknowledge the limitations of their “footprint” amongst the size of UCL and the inability to reach every member of the UCL community.
Although strategies to influence leaders at UCL have been implemented, staff in leadership roles can be difficult to reach, be time poor, or have other, usually very worthy priorities. As a whole, UCL leaders have been very receptive to learning and sharing information about the eugenics legacy, but any top-down model of dissemination has its limitations. Some success has been had by aligning the aims of ELEP to be thought leaders on teaching “difficult knowledge” with UCL’s major campaign Disagreeing Well. This is an example of what leading Comms academic Kevin Ruck calls the AVID framework. AVID stands for Alignment, Voice, Identification and Dialogue. It’s a contemporary framework for good internal communication practice that is linked to employee engagement and organisational success.
Ground-up approaches to communications
Ground-up, also known as bottom-up communication methods, bypass traditional top-down comms channels and have the ability to emphasise the importance of the contribution from a wide range of stakeholders, in particular staff and students. Done well, this is an inclusive, innovative, and collaborative communications method. One way that ELEP has contributed to this channel is via the support of the UCL ChangeMakers programme. These grants, of which ELEP has been an official theme, support students and staff who want to work together to enhance the learning experience of students at UCL. ELEP has helped fund an impressive 22 ChangeMakers projects from nine UCL faculties that link into ELEP’s project themes. Interestingly, many of these projects tackle related themes and therefore link ELEP’s work to a diverse range of other issues on campus.
Links with Yale and avoiding echo chambers
Institutional echo chambers are a danger when information or views are repeated, leading to a lack of diverse viewpoints. ELEP has been mindful of this issue and has made connections outside of UCL to help broaden the perspective. 22% of our community are from external organisations whilst we appointed an ELEP Honorary Professor, Arathi Sriprakash, Professor of Sociology and Education at The Univesity of Oxford, to help give an expert and external perspective to our work. Additionally, working with the anti-eugenics action group From Small Beginnings, an independent group which also has links with UCL, has helped ELEP tap into some of the global zeitgeist on the struggle against eugenics.
One of the highlights for ELEP in the final year of the project has been the burgeoning relationship with the Yale University Anti-Eugenics Collective (AECY). The AECY group of students who research the histories and legacies of the American eugenics movement at Yale and beyond are helping to write a new, positive chapter at the Ivy League university. The collective acknowledges that "Eugenic knowledge production was embedded in Yale’s campus" but are working hard to redefine the narrative towards anti-eugenics futures. In May 2025, several members of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale visited the ELEP team in Bloomsbury for two days of collaborative work and information exchange. The Yale group had so many ideas and their enthusiasm gave the ELEP team a real boost to work with such dynamic young people.
Student scholarship
UCL students have been key to the success of ELEP, with 20 students paid to do work on different aspects of the project. This includes two UCL PhD candidates, Alma Ionescu and Shodona Kettle, who have been interviewing third sector organisations for a unique outward facing ELEP project. Despite having very different research interests and academic backgrounds, working with ELEP’s academic lead Helen Knowler, the students have formed a formidable team to do pioneering research in an under-researched area. Students have been working to build and reorganise the ELEP website in anticipation of the close of the project whilst two students have become ELEP artists, with Weihong ‘Clover’ Tang the principal illustrator for the storytelling project.
Three student researchers, including IOE student Yuncong Liu, have been looking at reparative pedagogies to address and redress the historical legacies of eugenics within higher education. The students have faced many challenges with the project, including limited literature reviews and scholarship in this field but have also had the opportunity to work on a paper, present at conferences and take part in ELEP events.
Yuncong won funding to talk about her ELEP work in an engaging podcast Can Education Heal? The podcast revealed how little the ELEP team knew about UCL’s eugenics legacy before everyone joined the project, a reminder of why future work is needed.
Looking back, ELEP would perhaps have had even more impact with an increased emphasis on bottom-up student activity, but there would still have been capacity limits for the team. What can be agreed on though, is that involving students and nurturing their skills whilst reimbursing them for their time is a sound strategy for all those addressing harmful legacies.
Meet the artist
Hello! My name is Weihong Tang, also known as Clover. I used to be a communication designer, and I am currently studying for a Master’s degree in Education and Technology at UCL. My interests focus on the application of tools and media production in educational settings. I am passionate about discovering innovative ways to inspire learners and enhance learning experiences.
