Banu Subramaniam

Eugenics, history, and "good Science"

Variation, diversity and difference

• The social in the history of evolutionary biology
• Naturecultural framework reveals “inherent underlying logic of eugenics” in evolutionary biology
• Eugenics broadly construed: historically dynamic, ongoing, multifarious set of practices, politics and ideas concerned with making a “good society”

A genealogy of variation: all roads lead to Darwin

• Emergence in Darwinian revolution
• co-constitution of the biological and the socio-political
• The shift from “ideal” types to individuals to aggregate types as central focus

Thomas Galton and early eugenics

• Fusing Darwinism and a scientific impulse to improve society
• Nature vs. nurture; continuous vs. discontinuous variation
• The appeal of eugenics in the 19th C (Darwinism, population growth and shifts, political flexibility)
• Growth of eugenics and ascendency of science

From Eugenics to genetics

• Early synonymy “human betterment through science”
• Impulse to cast eugenics as an isolated scientific misstep or misapplication of “true” science and the importance of reading these histories together
• What is at stake in the erasure of eugenics from the history of biology?

Eugenics ongoing: population control and medical genetics

• Shift from state/centralized population control to a market model based on individual choice
• Continuing logic of protecting, eliminating, and assigning bodies worth

Invasion Biology

naturecultural Worlds of Invasion biology

• Aim: to trace the coproduction of knowledge on global migrations of humans, plants and animals
• Linked ideas of nature and place, arbitrariness of “native” category
• “The public face of science is critical to the institution of science”—scientists, policy, and media

Plants and people, immigration and invasion

• Botanical nativeness, roots in common law about human citizenship
• Post-Civil-War American ideas of nativeness, purity, and love for nature
• Temporal alignment of immigration concern, panic over invasive species

Plants and people, immigration and invasion

• Botanical nativeness, roots in common law about human citizenship
• Post-Civil-War American ideas of nativeness, purity, and love for nature
• Temporal alignment of immigration concern, panic over invasive species

Fear, xenophobia, and native/alien species:
• Nostalgia for a pure native biome
• The choice of rhetorical analysis

narrative, identity, discipline

The Social in Science

• Ethnography, biography, narrative, dialogue
• Graduate school as enculturation
• Masculinist culture—aggression, sexuality, gender
• “Male” vs. “female” emotions and rationality
• Interdisciplinarity
• Duke University today
...

QUESTIONS

Subramaniam (53) argues that theories of eugenics dovetailed with 19th-century ways of thinking neatly; they enjoyed "wide appeal, bringing together scientists, academics, museums, clergy and philanthropic organizations."

What scientific/medical questions mobilize such wide-ranging social action and anxiety today? What are the pertinent institutions now? How has social media changed this dynamic?

QUESTIONS
governing metaphors and frameworks:
naturecultures
ghosts
others?

QUESTIONS
criticism from reviews: audience and medium
"[Her] messages are familiar in science and technology studies and are important for aspiring female scientists. However, as traditional science undergraduate and graduate programs do not encourage or include training in gender studies, the book is unlikely to reach this audience."
"I am struck by the poverty of the literary medium itself to carry feminist science and technology studies where its authors urge: across boundaries to make a difference in the daily practice of gaining scientific knowledge. Is the medium of the book sufficient to deliver these vital messages?" (Sarah Wylie, Signs 41.3 Spring 2016)

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