Confronting the Legacy of Eugenics and Ableism: Towards Anti-Ableist Bioscience Education

da Silva, Sarah-Marie; Hubbard, Katharine

doi:10.1187/cbe.23-10-0195

Confronting the Legacy of Eugenics and Ableism: Towards Anti-Ableist Bioscience Education

da Silva, Sarah-Marie; Hubbard, Katharine

Authors

Sarah-Marie da Silva

Katharine Hubbard

Abstract

Society and education is inherently ableist. Disabled people are routinely excluded from education, or have poorer outcomes within educational systems. Improving educational experiences and outcomes for people of colour have required educators to design proactively anti-racist curricula. Here we explore parallel anti-ableist approaches to bioscience education, in an essay co-authored by a disabled bioscience student and able bodied faculty member in bioscience. Our work is underpinned by Critical Disability Theory, and draws on disability and pedagogical scholarship as well as our own experiences. The biosciences has a unique need to confront its history in the discredited pseudoscience of eugenics, which has led to discrimination and human rights abuses against disabled people. We provide a brief history of the relationship between biological sciences research and eugenics, and explore how this legacy impacts on bioscience education today. We then present a recommended structure for anti-ableist biology education. Our approach goes beyond providing disability access, to a model that educates all students about disability issues and empowers them to challenge anti-ableist narratives and practices.

Citation

da Silva, S.-M., & Hubbard, K. (2024). Confronting the Legacy of Eugenics and Ableism: Towards Anti-Ableist Bioscience Education. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 23(3), https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.23-10-0195

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jun 12, 2024
Online Publication Date	Jul 29, 2024
Publication Date	Sep 1, 2024
Deposit Date	Jun 17, 2024
Publicly Available Date	Jul 30, 2024
Journal	CBE-Life Sciences Education
Electronic ISSN	1931-7913
Publisher	American Society for Cell Biology
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	23
Issue	3
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.23-10-0195
Public URL	https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4710789

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Copyright Statement
© 2024 S.-M. Da Silva and K. Hubbard. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2024 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).