Eugenics and the Firewall

Eugenics and the Firewall

Author: Jane Harris

Publisher: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13:

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Between 1928 and 1972 nearly three thousand citizens were sterilized, lied to, experimented on, and subjected to daily abuse at hands of provincial staff in Alberta. Most Albertans have forgotten the victims whose names made headlines in the 1990s, and politicians and pundits have shown little empathy for the victims.


Facing Eugenics

Facing Eugenics

Author: Erika Dyck

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2013-12-31

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1442699345

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Facing Eugenics is a social history of sexual sterilization operations in twentieth-century Canada. Looking at real-life experiences of men and women who, either coercively or voluntarily, participated in the largest legal eugenics program in Canada, it considers the impact of successive legal policies and medical practices on shaping our understanding of contemporary reproductive rights. The book also provides deep insights into the broader implications of medical experimentation, institutionalization, and health care in North America. Erika Dyck uses a range of historical evidence, including medical files, court testimony, and personal records to place mental health and intelligence at the centre of discussions regarding reproductive fitness. Examining acts of resistance alongside heavy-handed decisions to sterilize people considered “unfit,” Facing Eugenics illuminates how reproductive rights fit into a broader discussion of what constitutes civil liberties, modern feminism, and contemporary psychiatric survivor and disability activism.


Eugenics at the Edges of Empire

Eugenics at the Edges of Empire

Author: Diane B. Paul

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-16

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 3319646869

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This volume explores the history of eugenics in four Dominions of the British Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. These self-governing colonies reshaped ideas absorbed from the metropole in accord with local conditions and ideals. Compared to Britain (and the US, Germany, and Scandinavia), their orientation was generally less hereditarian and more populist and agrarian. It also reflected the view that these young and enterprising societies could potentially show Britain the way — if they were protected from internal and external threat. This volume contributes to the increasingly comparative and international literature on the history of eugenics and to several ongoing historiographic debates, especially around issues of race. As white-settler societies, questions related to racial mixing and purity were inescapable, and a notable contribution of this volume is its attention to Indigenous populations, both as targets and on occasion agents of eugenic ideology.


The Eugenic Mind Project

The Eugenic Mind Project

Author: Robert A. Wilson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-12-22

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0262037203

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An examination of eugenic thinking past and present, from forced sterilization to prenatal screening, drawing on experience with those who survived eugenics. Part science and part social movement, eugenics emerged in the late nineteenth century as a tool for human improvement. In response to perceived threats of criminality, moral degeneration, feeble-mindedness, and “the rising tide of color,” eugenic laws and social policies aimed to better the human race by regulating reproductive choice through science and technology. In this book, Rob Wilson examines eugenic thought and practice—from forced sterilization to prenatal screening—drawing on his experience working with eugenics survivors. Using the social sciences' standpoint theory as a framework to understand the intersection of eugenics, disability, social inclusiveness, and human variation, Wilson focuses on those who have lived through a eugenic past and those confronted by the legacy of eugenic thinking today. By doing so, he brings eugenics from the distant past to the ongoing present. Wilson discusses such topics as the conceptualization of eugenic traits; the formulation of laws regulating immigration and marriage and requiring sexual sterilization; the depiction of the targets of eugenics as “subhuman”; the systematic construction of a concept of normality; the eugenic logic in prenatal screening and contemporary bioethics; and the incorporation of eugenics and disability into standpoint theory. Individual purchasers of this book will receive free access to the documentary Surviving Eugenics, available at EugenicsArchive.ca/film.


Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics

Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics

Author: Frank W. Stahnisch

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1771992654

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From 1928 to 1972, the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, Canada’s lengthiest eugenic policy, shaped social discourses and medical practice in the province. Sterilization programs—particularly involuntary sterilization programs—were responding both nationally and internationally to social anxieties produced by the perceived connection between mental degeneration and heredity. Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics illustrates how the emerging field of psychiatry and its concerns about inheritable conditions was heavily influenced by eugenic thought and contributed to the longevity of sterilization practices in Western Canada. Using institutional case studies, biographical accounts, and media developments from Western Canada and Europe, contributors trace the impact of eugenics on nursing practices, politics, and social attitudes, while investigating the ways in which eugenics discourses persisted unexpectedly and remained mostly unexamined in psychiatric practice. This volume further extends historical analysis into considerations of contemporary policy and human rights issues through a discussion of disability studies as well as compensation claims for victims of sterilization. In impressive detail, contributors shed new light on the medical and political influences of eugenics on psychiatry at a key moment in the field’s development. With contributions by Ashley Barlow, W. Mikkel Dack, Diana Mansell, Guel A. Russell, Celeste Tuong Vy Sharpe, Henderikus J. Stam, Douglas Wahlsten, Paul J. Weindling, Robert A. Wilson, Gregor Wolbring, and Marc Workman.


Challenging Choices

Challenging Choices

Author: Erika Dyck

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2020-11-18

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 022800442X

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Between the decriminalization of contraception in 1969 and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, a landmark decade in the struggle for women's rights, public discourse about birth control and family planning was transformed. At the same time, a transnational conversation about the "population bomb" that threatened global famine caused by overpopulation embraced birth control technologies for a different set of reasons, revisiting controversial ideas about eugenics, heredity, and degeneration. In Challenging Choices Erika Dyck and Maureen Lux argue that reproductive politics in 1970s Canada were shaped by competing ideologies on global population control, poverty, personal autonomy, race, and gender. For some Canadians the 1970s did not bring about an era of reproductive liberty but instead reinforced traditional power dynamics and paternalistic structures of authority. Dyck and Lux present case studies of four groups of Canadians who were routinely excluded from progressive, reformist discourse: Indigenous women and their communities, those with intellectual and physical disabilities, teenage girls, and men. In different ways, each faced new levels of government regulation, scrutiny, or state intervention as they negotiated their reproductive health, rights, and responsibilities in the so-called era of sexual liberation. While acknowledging the reproductive rights gains that were made in the 1970s, the authors argue that the legal changes affected Canadians differently depending on age, social position, gender, health status, and cultural background. Illustrating the many ways to plan a modern family, these case studies reveal how the relative merits of life and choice were pitted against each other to create a new moral landscape for evaluating classic questions about population control.


Beyond Testimony and Trauma

Beyond Testimony and Trauma

Author: Steven High

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2015-03-15

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0774828951

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Survivors of terrible events are often portrayed as unsung heroes or tragic victims but rarely as complex human beings whose lives extend beyond the stories they have told. Beyond Testimony and Trauma considers other ways to engage with survivors and their accounts based on insights gained from long-term oral history projects in a variety of contexts, including factory closures, industrial injury, eugenics and forced sterilization, the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, Argentinian torture camps, the Yugoslav Wars, and Jewish emigration from the Maghreb. The contributors, all innovators in the field of oral history, include Henry Greenspan who provides reflections from forty years of listening to Holocaust survivors as well as an insightful afterword. They demonstrate that – through deep listening, long-term relationship building, and collaborative research design – it is possible to move beyond the problematic aspects of “testimony” to shine light on the more nuanced lives of survivors of mass violence. In the process, they offer alternative approaches to the collection of oral history that will shake the foundations of current historiographical practice.


Rethinking Disability

Rethinking Disability

Author: Patrick Devlieger

Publisher: Maklu

Published: 2016-06-15

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9044134175

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The act of life is a lived experience, common and unique, that ties each of us to every other lived experience. The fact of disability does not alter this fundamental truth. In this edition of Rethinking Disability: World Perspectives in Culture and Society, we are presented with a system of thinking that considers the values of disability, as a resource, as a creative source of culture that moves disability out of the realm of victimized people and insurmountable barriers, and provides opportunities to use the experience of disability to enter into networks that recognize strengths of differing abilities. The authors within will intrigue you, will move you, will charm you, but always will challenge your notion of sameness and difference as they confront the construct and (de)construct of disability and ableism. They present compelling arguments for viewing disABILITY through the multiple lenses of disability culture. They explore themes and issues that transcend past and origins, time and place, nuances of genetics, to experiences of present and becoming, and towards the future and beyond mere human, yet always intrinsically connected to being human. This book is intended for all audiences who dare to confront difference and sameness within themselves and in connection with others; to inspire researchers who wish to explore, and examine disability across social, cultural and economic barriers. It is an invitation to push away the barriers, bring ableism inside to a place where the prosthesis is no longer the elephant in the room.


The Routledge Guidebook to Foucault's The History of Sexuality

The Routledge Guidebook to Foucault's The History of Sexuality

Author: Chloe Taylor

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-11-03

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1317539060

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Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality is one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century and has been instrumental in shaping the study of Gender, Feminist Theory and Queer Theory. But Foucault’s writing can be a difficult book to grasp as Foucault assumes a familiarity with the intellectually dominant theories of his time which renders many passages obscure for newcomers to his work. The Routledge Guidebook to Foucault’s The History of Sexuality offers a clear and comprehensive guide to this groundbreaking work, examining: The historical context in which Foucault wrote A critical discussion of the text, which examines the relationship between The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of The Self The reception and ongoing influence of The History of Sexuality Offering a close reading of the text, this is essential reading for anyone studying this enormously influential work.


Preventing Mental Illness

Preventing Mental Illness

Author: Despo Kritsotaki

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 3319986996

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This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice: from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education; from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come. Chapters 3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com