filed under Activism | Get Out of the House
The Amazing Race (Discussions At AS220 This Month)
3:52PM ON
10/01/2008
BY
Matthew Lawrence
The first edition of Action Speaks starts at AS220 in about 45 minutes. The series, which tackles important but generally ignored moments in American history, is dealing mainly with race this year, as part of the Road To Freedom series.
This year’s programming is also exciting because local PBS affiliate Channel 36 is getting involved, too.
I’m at the library right now, listening to someone teaching a bunch of teenagers how to use things on the internet that aren’t Myspace (while, simultaneously, that grumpy woman tells people that their time is up), so I’m going to wait to list the full calendar. But here’s what’s up for tonight (and if you can’t make it, don’t worry, the whole thing will be on WRNI on Sunday):
Racist biologist Charles Davenport creates the Eugenic Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
An American prelude to Hitler or to the Human Genome Project…perhaps both?
Wed, October 1
5:30-7:00 p.m. at AS220
Mon, October 6, 2008
9:00 p.m. on RI PBS
“Our Genes, Our Choices: Genes on Trial”
Sun, October 5, 2008
Broadcast 8:00 p.m. on WRNI
Eugenics was a global movement popular in the United States at the turn of the last century. Proponents believed that knowledge about hereditary genetics could be used to cultivate better human beings. They promoted ideas like “fitter family” contests, government-supported sterilization, and laws prohibiting anyone who was “epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded” from marrying. Eugenicists were suspicious of groups they feared posed a threat to the purity of the native-born stock. Bad people, right? Not so fast. Although eugenics inspired some of Hitler’s most deplorable actions, many progressives, religious leaders, and academics initially endorsed the movement. In the past though, right? Again, not so easy…how about our current interest in using gene technology to make decisions about who should and shouldn’t be born? Isn’t this a form of engineering the future? Eugenics in the context of history, science, culture, religion, philosophy, and politics–the idea of normative and links to today’s search for genetic perfection.
Featured Guests:
Lundy Braun, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University. Braun’s research focus includes the history of the global circulation of knowledge about race and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as, race, genomics, and health inequality.
Wendy Kline, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati. Kline is the author of Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, a history of the eugenics movement.
Diane B. Paul, Professor Emerita in the Political Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she directed the interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology, and Values. Her research has focused on historical and policy issues in genetics.
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