Legacies of Eugenics 9 am-5 pm, Tuesday April 7 (Virtual)

9-9:05 am: Opening Remarks

9:05-9:50 am: Institutional In(Visibility): Eugenics, Disability, and the Afterlives of Medical Control 

Dr. Kate Benson, Rich Cairn, Graham Warder, Alex Green 

This panel examines how institutions shaped the histories, narratives, and legacies of eugenics in the United States, with particular attention to sterilization, isolation, and medical experimentation both during life and after death. Drawing on case studies from state schools, hospitals, and research centers, panelists will explore how institutional policies and practices not only enacted violence on disabled people’s bodies but also framed public narratives about disability, heredity, and “fitness.” The discussion will highlight how these legacies of eugenics remain embedded in cultural memory, medical ethics, and ongoing struggles for disability justice. By situating institutional practices within broader histories of exclusion and control, the panel asks: Whose stories have been made visible, whose remain invisible, and how do these choices continue to shape the collective memory of disability?

9:50-10 am: Break

10-10:20 am: Anti-Eugenic Organizing: Learning from Our Activist Ancestors

Luke Van Niel

This presentation will explore the tactics of activist groups organizing against eugenics throughout the 20th century to identify strategies for our current fight against advancements in eugenic ideology. Drawing from disability literature on eugenics, as well as my own archival research on anti-eugenics organizing tactics, it will attend to both material organizing strategies and the broader ideological work of countering views of disability as something to be prevented or eliminated.

10:20-10:40 am: A Revolution May Be in Order:” Disability Communities on Reddit React to Project 2025’s Implementation

Casey Doherty (she/her)

This presentation examines Reddit discussions in r/disability and r/disabled about Project 2025, a 900-page authoritarian policy playbook for a far-right presidential administration. Analyzing 1,093 comments from the first five months of the second Trump administration, I identified major concerns around health care access, social safety net benefits, employment, and more. Commenters described losing essential supports and fearing future rollbacks, revealing how Project 2025 policies are directly reshaping disabled people’s lives. 

10:40-11 am: Q&A/Discussion

Moderator: Kenya Loudd

12-12:05 pm: Opening Remarks 

12:05-12:50 pm: The Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale: Histories and Practices of Resistance (Panel)

Sarah Shapiro, Jaylen Moment, Lakshmi Ananya Nakka, and Sabrina Zheng 

Sarah’s abstract: 

While most accounts of Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) begin with the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, this presentation offers an intervention to the historiography of federal special education policy by tracing their obscured roots in psychometry journals of the early 1900s and parental litigative advocacy of the early 1970s. By unsettling the genealogy of IEPs, this presentation exposes the eugenic regimes of classification embedded in their structure.

Jaylen’s abstract: 

 I will talk about how the eugenics movement, rooted in anti-disability sentiments, contributed to the popularization of carcerality, which led to the creation of habitual offender and sterilization laws. 

Lakshmi’s abstract: 

Eugenic thinkers created discriminatory standards and procedures to measure intelligence, and abused results of so-called studies to justify racism and forced sterilizations. These standards for measurement have lived on in today’s education system, particularly through standardized testing and approaches to special education. This presentation aims to highlight eugenic remnants in education, and proposes a two-fold methodology to combat it, asking educational systems to improve knowledge about eugenics and re-evaluating standards of measurement.

1 pm-1:20 pm: Disabled Citizenship, Eugenics, and Reparations

Moira Armstrong, Lauren Shallish, Alison Howell, Arron Wheeler

Eugenics and its legacies continue to inform the lives of disabled people and people of color. Disabled Citizenship, Eugenics, and Reparations examines the complicity of Rutgers University in eugenics and the responsibility of the university to engage in repair. This panel will highlight the preliminary results of archival research to understand and document Rutgers’s entanglement in a statewide system of eugenics and highlight potential for interdisciplinary reparative pedagogy through a participatory action research course.

This session will be pre-recorded.

1:20-1:40 pm: Pathologizing Queerness: The Pastoral-Psychiatric Collaboration in American Bourgeois Authority

Clayton Jarrard

In 1920s New York City, a prominent liberal Protestant pastor in Greenwich Village – faced with “a case of homosexuality” in a private counseling session – consulted a leading American psychiatrist, decades before the DSM-I inaugurated homosexuality as a psychiatric diagnosis. The resulting case study, preserved in archival remnants, complicates American historical narratives of disability and madness, race, queerness, and class by demonstrating the collaboration between pastoral and psychiatric power in pathologizing queerness through homosexuality.

1:40-2 pm: Q&A/Discussion

Moderator: Hayley Serpa

3-3:05 pm: Opening Remarks

3:05-3:50 pm: Cuerpos Justificados [Justified Bodies]: Our Lives, Our Stories [Nuestras Vidas, Nuestras Historias] (Panel)

Elissa Larkin, Genevieve Ramos, Joy Young, Timotheus (T.J.) Gordon, Jr.

This panel offers a cross-disability response to recent media coverage on autism. We offer, through lived examples and perspectives on employment, art-making, storytelling, identity, love, and collective care, an exploration of the humanity and intersectionality of what makes our disabled lives valuable. We will also invite the audience into conversation about how we thrive in a world not made to hold us, and how we might imagine a world better situated to do so.

4-4:20 pm: From ‘Bad X’ to Counter-Narratives: How Families with Fragile X Resist Genetic Determinism 

Caroline DeVane

This presentation examines how families living with an X-linked chromosomal condition navigate and resist eugenic legacies embedded in genetic medicine. I explore how families internalize yet resist medicalized language—e.g. inheriting the “bad X” versus “good X”—while simultaneously creating counter-narratives that challenge genetic determinism. This presentation explores narratives as sites of intersubjective negotiation where families imaginatively, practically, and politically navigate between deterministic biomedical framings and lived experience, both enacting and resisting medical authority.

4:20-4:40 pm: Walking Through In(Visibility): A Personal Journey of Disability, Mobility, and Inclusion

Hassan Aliyu Mu’azu 

This presentation draws from my lived experience as a person with mobility impairment navigating education, technology, and everyday life in Nigeria. It explores what it means to move through a world that often sees disability as “invisible,” and how inclusive design and awareness can change that reality. The session invites reflection on how belonging and visibility can coexist through empathy, accessibility, and shared understanding.

4:40-5 pm: Q&A/Discussion

Moderator: Samuel Suh

Visit separate event page to register for this panel: 

Panel: “Latine.x curatorial practices and accessibility: fabulating belongings”