The Anti-Eugenics Project
Phase One: Dismantling Eugenics - A Convening, 9/27/21 - 10/2/21
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Rooting in Justice to Reckon with Eugenics

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Prominent scholars and leaders N. Ordover, Mab Segrest, and Miroslava Chavez-Garcia in conversation that imagins the possibilities of how to confront historical eugenic institutions and ideologies from population control to psychiatric institutions. Exploring what justice frameworks and movements, including the climate justice movement, Reproductive Justice, Black Lives Matter movement; and how the Not One More Detention Centers & LGBTGNCI and Pro-Abortion Campaigns are shifting the political and cultural landscape to dismantle archaic ideas towards new futures.

Presenters

  • Dr. N. Ordover
    N. Ordover is the author of American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. They earned their PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and received a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship from Columbia University’s Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights. After co-founding/directing the Coalition to Lift the Bar, an alliance of LGBTQ, BIPOC, immigrant justice, and HIV/AIDS organizations that waged a successful campaign to overturn the US bar to entry, residence, and stay for people living with HIV, Ordover served on a UNAIDS international task team addressing the health, human rights, and economic impact(s) of such bans on immigrants, migrants, refugees, asylees, and detainees. They currently work at American Jewish World Service. Ordover lives and writes in Brooklyn.

  • Mab Segrest
    The arc of Mab Segrest’s work spans forty years and profound cultural shifts, the resolution of which still hangs in perilous balance. In 1984, the poet Adrienne Rich wrote about Mab Segrest’s first book, My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, proclaiming, “Mab Segrest is of a younger generation than I, another kind of family. But her essays speak to the whispers in my bones, and they both remind and instruct me. To understand this country, we need to know the American South from the perspective of those who, like Margaret Walker, like Mab Segrest, have lived real lives there all along.” In 2020, Segrest is back with a reissue of her classic anti-racist text Memoir of a Race Traitor: Fighting Racism in the American South and an epic new volume, Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry from Georgia’s Milledgeville Asylum. This in-depth asylum study is already being hailed as a landmark of scholarship, a “profoundly great book,” and a “gripping” and “compelling” and “monumental” narrative.

  • Dr. Miroslava Chavez-Garcia
    Professor of History
    UC Santa Barbara
    Affiliate in Chicana/o Studies, Feminist Studies, and Iberian and Latin American Studies
    Faculty Director, McNair Scholars Program