ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Unbecoming Science: Eugenics and the Problem of Ends

• In Event: ESHS Early Career Lectures

English Abstract

Historians of science are good at origin stories. The scholarly literature is replete with painstaking reconstructions of the coming into being of new sciences, from astrophysics to zoology. The making of a new science, we tend to agree, is not merely an intellectual event, but also an institutional and sociological one. It involves building networks, constructing communities, and forging infrastructure. The arrival of a new science is very often signalled, historically as today, by the appearance of dedicated journals, learned societies, university departments and named professorial chairs.

We know how sciences begin. But how do they end? This talk calls for our field to turn its collective attention toward the problem of scientific endings. Unmaking a scientific discipline, just as making one, is an active process, requiring effort, coordination, persuasion, and investment. Our occupation with origins has meant that we, as historians of science, know surprisingly little about the processes and patterns by which the disciplinary infrastructures of past sciences are dismantled and discarded or, at times, reimagined and repurposed.

I illustrate the rewards of this refocussing through the example of eugenics. This one-time ‘science’ is especially illuminating of the dynamics of scientific endings, precisely because its demise is so often discussed, yet so poorly understood. In this talk I ask how we may profitably reimagine the ‘end’ of eugenics through a focus on the long-term fates of its disciplinary infrastructure—the journals, the societies, the university departments—which, for several decades, sustained eugenics’ claim to scientific status.

Author

• Alex Aylward, University of Oxford