Release: Summer
Seminar to Explore Germany's Eugenics Legacy
Byline: Paul Francuch. Release date: June 29, 2004
A month-long seminar taking
place in Germany and organized by two University of Illinois at Chicago
disability studies experts will consider the topic, "Disability Studies
and the Legacies of Eugenics."
An interdisciplinary panel
of experts from the United States, Canada and Germany will discuss the
contemporary situation of disabled people in Germany by assessing facts
behind the Nazi killings of more than 270,000+ disabled people during
World War Two.
The seminar takes place July
5-30 at Germany's Einstein
Forum at the University of Potsdam.
UIC's Sharon
Snyder, assistant professor of Disability and Human Development, organized
and will direct the seminar. David
Mitchell, associate professor of Disability and Human Development,
will serve as co-director. Sander Gilman, distinguished professor of the
liberal arts and sciences and medicine, is a seminar adviser.
Seminar participants will assess
Germany's legacy of the now underground eugenics movement by reviewing
the development and growth of disability studies in the country and the
effects it has had on fields such as education, medicine, rehabilitation,
genetics and bio-ethics. Each of the seminar's 19 participants has either
developed a disabilities studies program or taught a course on the subject
at their respective university.
"Participants include
many bio-ethicists as well as historians," said Snyder. "The
group will pursue new knowledge about the politics and practices of disability
in scientific fields today and in the past."
An exhibition entitled "The
Imperfect Person" this past year shown at both Berlin's Gropius Bau
and the Dresden Hygiene Museum has attracted considerable German public
and scholarly interest in the history and culture of people with disabilities
and the relationship of that culture to scholarship and political practices.
In conjunction with the seminars,
four public lectures will be delivered on related subjects. Two of the
talks will be by German disability studies scholars Anne Waldschmidt,
Universität zu Köln, and Katrin Gruber, IMEW Institut Mensch,
Ethik, und Wissenschaft, Berlin; UIC’s Snyder and Mitchell will
present their own film and lecture at the Einstein Forum during the institute.
The summer seminar is held
annually by the Einstein Forum and is sponsored by the Forum, the
German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch
Dienst), and this year by UIC's
Humanities Laboratory, Department
of Disability and Human Development, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago,
and the Ph.D.
program in Disability Studies.
For more information about
the summer institute please contact Dr.
Sharon Snyder
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