California Legacies of Eugenics Project;

Eugenics in California and the World: Race, Class, Gender/Sexuality, and Disability

Friday - Saturday, June 4th-5th, 2021
Fri 4th - 1-4.15pm PT / 4-7.15pm EST / 9pm-2.15am BST
Sat 5th - 9.30am-4.30pm PT / 12.30pm-7.30pm EST / 5.30pm-2.30am BST

Livestream: YouTube – https://youtu.be/9tKLzCzE9Ak
Webinar: Zoom – https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89876633951

Virtual Symposium hosted by UC Santa Barbara

This symposium is part of ongoing national and international conversations on the influence of eugenics beliefs and practices across a multitude of private and public institutions, spaces, and places.* Focusing specifically on the legacies of eugenics in California, this event brings together a diverse group of scholars, educators, students, activists, and community members to engage in dialogue exploring how state institutions of higher learning, health care, and government promoted, sustained, and mainstreamed eugenics via educational, medical, and public contexts.

Extending over two days, the gathering will open with a keynote panel focusing generally on history, memory, and reparations: how do we come to terms with the violence of eugenics carried out in and on communities across California? The next session will present new research on the ways in which eugenics shaped the work of researchers, professors, and doctors in various state institutions, including the University of California. Then we will turn our attention to the findings of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the University of Michigan, learning about the massive digitization project and analysis of more than 20,000 sterilization records in California. The following session will explore continuing struggles to excise eugenics-based beliefs, confronting ableism, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism and racism in medicine, science, and child welfare systems. Next, activists working in law, prisons, disability justice, and reproductive justice will update us on their ongoing fights for reparations and against eugenic ideology and practice. Finally, we will hear from activists-researchers-scholars about new modes and discourses of eugenics in developments of reproductive technology and biotechnology, many of them emerging out of California.

There will be ASL and live captioning. For any additional information or access needs, please email Isidro Gonzalez <isidrogonzalez@ucsb.edu>

For more information and Bios follow link

SYMPOSIUM (I) - Eugenics in California and the World: Race, Class, Gender/Sexuality, and Disability

SYMPOSIUM (II) - Eugenics in California and the World: Race, Class, Gender/Sexuality, and Disability

California Eugenics Legacies Network

California Eugenic Legacies Network

For much of the 20th century, California was at the forefront of eugenic ideology and practices in the US, and globally, and California holds the dubious distinction of being the state with the highest number of eugenic sterilizations performed under the authority of law – some 20,000 procedures between 1909 and the mid-1950s – a law which Hitler stated as a model for the Third Reich. Coerced sterilizations continued in public hospitals into the 1970s, and it has recently come to light that in recent years, women prisoners in California have been sterilized without their consent or knowledge. Today, California is a leader in research and services related to human genomics and assisted reproductive technologies, as well as at the forefront of some implicitly eugenic projects stemming out of Silicon Valley.

California has also been very much at the forefront of anti-eugenics these last few years. In 2021, following the Los Angeles County apology of 2018, California passed the Reparations Bill for the victims of forced/coerced sterilization, and it spoke to how the legacies of eugenics and their trauma are still felt deeply in targeted communities across the state. The scale and variety of major Californian institutions that have gone through a surfacing of their eugenic legacies over the last few years, whether Higher Education institutions (such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech, etc), schools (for example, Jordan High School, Jordan Middle School, Terman Middle School, amongst others), park systems (such as Prairie Creek Redwood or Muir Woods), conservation movements (such as Save the Redwoods, and the Sierra Club), the press (such as the LA Times), etc., has starkly demonstrated how many aspects of the California story has been impacted and deeply intertwined with eugenics. These different reckonings and the anti-eugenic momentum they have generated, have placed California (as well as in many ways at the center of eugenic histories) at the forefront of global anti-eugenic intervention, serving as inspiration and at times a model for anti-eugenic interventions across the world.

Around FSB activities in California, in 2020 a grant from UCHRI resulted in the development of a California Eugenics Legacies network -- a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary group of scholars working in the sciences, medicine, arts, humanities, film, and law, as well as ethnic studies, American studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, and Latinx and Chicanx studies programs, and also including artists, activists, and community members -- have come together to root out eugenic ideas and ideologies as well as practices and beliefs in California. We bring a diverse set of methodological tools, theoretical frameworks, and source materials to investigate similar questions, find answers, seek solutions, and offer new perspectives, scenarios, and answers.

If you are interested in hearing more about the group's activities or connecting with the group, please get in touch.