Welcome to Aran Khanna, John Jeffers, and Eamon O’Brien’s project for CB: 47. We have compiled a project detailing the origins, history, and contemporary manifestations of eugenics with an emphasis on multimedia content. You can use the tabs above to navigate the project in sequential order. We hope you enjoy reading what we have composed. What follows is our supporting text for the project.
When we first sat down and began brainstorming topics for our final project, we all agreed on one thing: we should do a topic that is not so cut-and-dry and one that we were not all too familiar with as we wanted the project to be a substantive learning experience. As we sifted through the course syllabus and reminisced over the topics that we had covered over the course of the semester, it became readily apparent that the topic that we had the least knowledge about before the course and that could invite a nuanced approach in project form was that of eugenics. Aside from some of us briefly hearing about the eugenics movement in our United States history courses in high school, we learned all that we know about eugenics and its foundations through this course. We wanted to go beyond the course readings and utilize the wealth of information that is on the web to lay out an objective overview of the foundations of eugenics and its manifestations in contemporary times. We believed that many people are not well read on the topic of eugenics and its history as it is seems to be viewed as a tabooed topic. Thus, we hoped to present an objective overview of the origin of eugenics and how some eugenic principles are alive in today’s society, though not in the patently inhumane form that many would typically associate with anything related to eugenics.
As members of the Millennial Generation, we have a particular fondness for online content and multimedia, so we believed that a more interactive and visual project form would be the best medium for laying out our coverage of eugenics. Based on our readings and coverage of eugenics in class, we were well aware of the importance of eugenics during the time of Sir Francis Galton and World War II, but we wanted to go outside the traditional scope of focus on eugenics. We decided to split up our coverage of eugenics into four time periods: Pre-Galton, Galton, World War II, and modern-day. We were interested in investigating what precursors to Galton’s eugenics there may have been and any current manifestations of eugenic principles. It proved difficult to trace any specifics regarding eugenics before Galton as Galton legitimized eugenics as a science during his lifetime; however, we were able to delineate some pretty clear examples of eugenic principles in practice and individuals supporting those principles in modern times.
The primary takeaway that we wanted people to have from our project is that there is value in having conversations concerning topics stemming from the concept of eugenics despite its dark past. We are getting to the point when designer babies and the like are becoming more of a reality. As we discuss in the project, startups focused on decreasing the probability of one’s kin having various ailments and the like are very much a reality and people are flocking to them. All of these sorts of business ventures have business models more or less based on eugenic principles, but they are operating under the guise of promoting the general welfare. Is there potentially value in these businesses or should we blindly reject them as remnants of the sort of eugenics that Nazi Germany practiced in the 1900s? We think that the answer to that is clear and it illustrates how open conversation and objective analysis allows for topics that are normally considered taboo (like eugenics) to actually provoke thoughtful and worthwhile dialogues.
eugenicsweb.wordpress.com 