Remembering Eugenics at Berkeley and in California

• Fulfills the studio requirement for the Certificate in Urban Humanities

This Humanities Studio and Mentored Research Lab will confront the histories and legacies of eugenics close to home, at UC Berkeley, in the town of Berkeley, and in California. Our university’s a good location for this work, since “higher education” has been a key site for the development of the structures through which eugenics is conducted: IQ and achievement testing, disciplinary policies, segregation, and ideas about who’s fit to, and who deserves to be, in a place like this. Facing Berkeley’s deep eugenic past is one way to start doing reparations for our university’s part in how science was used and misused in the name of “race betterment.” Understanding eugenics means inevitably grappling intersectionally with histories of race, nation, disability, gender, class, and sexuality, in the twentieth century and beyond. Student work, across a wide range of disciplines, will explore, and publicly present, the legacy of eugenics in California: what it means here, now. The topic’s urgent. We are seeing an alarming resurgence of the rhetoric and practice of a century ago.

The course will foreground the interdisciplinary network of academics and community activists working on the continuing legacy of eugenics in California. Part of a transnational project, “From Small Beginnings”, the group aims to recover and foreground the voices and experiences of thousands of Californians subjected to eugenic ideologies, policies, and practices. Our work will connect with that project, focusing on nearby histories of eugenics. At the same time, we’ll place our explorations of the politics and ethics of commemoration in a broader, international context. Students will help organize UCB’s hosting of the University of London’s From Small Beginnings exhibit, and we’ll design local, Berkeley and California-based additions to that exhibit.  Individual and group research projects will use methods that may include public art installations, performance, audio storytelling, video, augmented reality, mapping, photography, campaigns for naming and renaming, and designs for memorials or anti-memorials.