Conference on “Race, Science and Eugenics in East Central Europe in the19th and 20th Centuries”

CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY, QUELLENSTRASSE51, 1100 WIEN, AUSTRIA.

2–3 NOVEMBER, 2021, QS D-001 TIERED ROOM

The centennial of the Second International Eugenics Congress (1921) provides an excellent opportunity to focus on how eugenics has been used and misused over the past century and to critically assess how eugenics continues to globally influence political, social and medical ideas, as well as practices and policies.

The conference will also address moral, political, and social issues linked to the history of race and science more generally. The theme is central to Central European University (CEU), which will build its new Vienna campus at the Otto-Wagner-Areal

(‘Steinhof’), a former psychiatric hospital in which serious medical abuses took place.

Our conference is organized by Professor Emese Lafferton at the Department of History (CEU), in cooperation with the Steinhof Visioning Group (CEU) and the transnational project entitled ‘From Small Beginnings...’, which facilitates events on the centennial.

The centennial of the Second International Eugenics Congress (1921) provides an excellent opportunity to focus on how eugenics has been used and misused over the past century and to critically assess how eugenics continues to globally influence political, social and medical ideas, as well as practices and policies.
The conference will also address moral, political, and social issues linked to the history of race and science more generally. The theme is central to Central European University (CEU), which will build its new Vienna campus at the Otto-Wagner-Areal
(‘Steinhof’), a former psychiatric hospital in which serious medical abuses took place.
Our conference is organized by Professor Emese Lafferton at the Department of History (CEU), in cooperation with the Steinhof Visioning Group (CEU) and the transnational project entitled ‘From Small Beginnings...’, which facilitates events on the centennial.

Program

Tuesday, 2 November 2021, QS D-001 Tiered Room, CEU
15:30-15:45 Opening remarks by Emese Lafferton (Department of History, CEU)
15:45 – 17:15 Panel 1. “Tainted Disciplines, Approaches and Epistemic Languages: National and Minority Perspectives”
Chair: TBA
15:45 – 16:15 Vita Zalar (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts): The return of biology in Romani Studies: genetic research in a multidisciplinary field of knowledge production
16:15 – 16:45 Viola Lászlófi (Atelier Department of Interdisciplinary History, ELTE University of Budapest): From fate analysis to work therapy: biological and social approach to mental illnesses in the 1940’s and 1950’s in Hungary (The case of István Benedek)
16:45 – 17:15 Nikola Ludlova (Department of History, CEU; CEFRES): In Pursuit of Proof: Ethnic Statistics and Evidence as Technologies of Governmentality
17:30 – 19:00 Round-table Discussion: “Medical and Anthropological Collections – Their Tainted Past and Problematic Future”
Opening remarks by Michael Miller (Nationalism studies program, CEU; Steinhof Visioning Group)
Moderator: Emese Lafferton (Department of History, CEU)
Participants: Thomas Mayer (Natural History Museum, Vienna), Herwig Czech (Department of Ethics, Collections and History of Medicine, Medical University of Vienna), Margit Berner (Natural History Museum, Vienna)
Respondents: Felicitas Heiman-Jelinek (freelance curator, head of the Curatorial Education Program of the Association of European Jewish Museums), Hannes Sulzenbacher (exhibition curator, head of the scientific team of the new Austrian exhibition at the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau)

Wednesday, 3 November 2021 QS D-001 Tiered Room, CEU
9:00 – 10:30 Panel 2. “Central European Eugenics: Concepts, Practices and Expertise”
Chair: TBA
9:00 – 9:30 Vojtěch Pojar (Department of History, CEU; CEFRES): Symbiosis and Mutual Help: Two Circulating Concepts in the Late Habsburg Empire
9:30 – 10:00 Martin Kuhar (Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences): "Eugenics has nothing in common with hygiene”: the many faces of Croatian eugenics, 1900-1941
10:00 – 10:30 Lucija Balikić, (Department of History, CEU): Improving the Yugoslav Man and Woman: eugenicist activism in the Sokol organization of interwar Yugoslavia
10:45 – 12:45 Panel 3: “Biopolitics, Measurments and Quantification”
Chair: Maria Kronfeldner
10:45 – 11:15 Zsuzsanna Varga (Department of Gender Studies, CEU): Overlapping repertoire of whiteness and national specificities: A case study from Hungary
11:15 – 11:45 Barna Szamosi (Institute of English Studies, American Studies, and German Studies, Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger): Medical decisions influenced by eugenics: Hungarian gynecological practices during the 1910s.
11:45 – 12:15 Nikolaus Thoman (Department of History, Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna): Development and diffusion of intelligence tests in interwar Vienna
12:15 – 12:45 Vinko Korotaj Drača (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb): Hereditary burdened individuals: Eugenics, poverty and crime in 19th century Croatian Psychiatry
13:30 – 14:30 Discussion of future co-operation with participants of the transnational initiative ‘From small beginnings...’ moderated by Benedict Ipgrave, founder of the initiative and co-director of the ’Anti-Eugenics Project’. Conference participants only.

https://events.ceu.edu/index.php/2021-11-02/race-science-and-eugenics-east-central-europe-19th-and-20th-centuries