“The Value of Diverse Learners and Scholars”

Katrina Jirik (University of Minnesota)

Often when discussing diversity, disability only comes up in the context of accommodations, and yet, once people begin engaging the topic, they often find it exists everywhere; it just hasn’t been explored. Part of my research examines the role of science in the development of American institutions for the feeble-minded at the turn of the twentieth century, which grew out of an interest in eugenics. Current historiography, most of which was not written by historians, ignores the role that the changing scientific understanding of heredity had on their development. What sparked my interest was the incongruity between the terrible institutions depicted in the secondary literature and the three to five hundred people on waiting lists for admission. My research is leading to new and differing conclusions in this field. As a member of the roundtable and a person with a disability, I bring a different perspective and ask different questions because I have a different life experience and will share some of these insights. In addition, I will contribute ideas on accommodating students with disabilities in the academic classroom which will demonstrate ways to value diversity.

“The Importance of Being Earnest”

Donald Opitz (DePaul University)

In my comments to this roundtable, I will propose a strategy for engaging diversity in history of science that makes a revisionist argument for “the evidence of experience,” in defiance of Joan Wallach Scott’s seminal 1991 critique against it. In the midst of historians’ proliferation of narratives that asserted difference based on subjects’ claimed experiences, Scott called upon historians to refocus. She called upon historians to analyze the very structures and discourses that create difference—thereby exposing the very forces that construct subjects’ testimonies of experience. As a queer historian of science, I argue instead for the utility of the “evidence of experience” in efforts to “queer” the history of science. To widen the profession’s receptivity to diversity, I suggest that the required work must integrate the radicalization of historiography with professional activism, and in this regard, it is incumbent upon the historian of science to enact queerness in both scholarship and professional engagement. I will illustrate with examples of my own work. To quote Oscar Wilde, there is the importance of being earnest beyond the text, and in this sense, then, I argue for the evidence of experience in queering history of science.

“Statement vs. Practice: Antiracism Discourse in the History of Science”

Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania)

In this talk, I examine the tensions between antiracist discourse and antiracist practice in the history of science. As a discipline, the history of science has made important contributions towards tracking the origins of an antiracist discourse in science. Historians of race science have shown how twentieth century scientists mobilized ideas from the evolutionary synthesis in biology and the cultural turn in anthropology to challenge scientific racism. The 1950 and 1951 UNESCO Statements on Race have often figured as the most emblematic expressions of this antiracist shift in science and as the beginnings of a population based approach to human biological diversity. But what kinds of practical commitments did this discursive shift entail? Historians of the life sciences have shown how this discursive shift led to projects of genetic salvage that unwittingly replicated colonial projects of indigenous dispossession. In my own work, I examine how this antiracist shift in postwar social science legitimated a variety of projects oriented towards dismantling the ways of life of racial minorities and so-called “primitive” peoples and replacing them with the technologies and ways of life of a white Western modernity. How mid-century antiracist discourse legitimated practices that valorized whiteness as a benchmark of modernity is most evident, I argue, when we relocate the history of racial thought to the Global South. Thus, when we consider questions of diversity – a close cousin of antiracism – in the history of science, it is important to consider the ways in which diversity statements can reinforce status quo practices.

“Moving from Diversity to Equity”

Jessica Nickrand (American Academy of Neurology)

Attempts at diversity and inclusion that seek to bring voices of marginalized populations into the room are important. Historically, these efforts have been programs like affirmative action, centers for students with disabilities, and, in my own case, graduate school fellowships for firstgeneration college students. These methods are good, and we have seen marked demographic shifts in higher education because of them. But we need to push further, and work toward broad-based systems change if these diversity and inclusion efforts are meant to achieve the goals we hope that they will. I am a historian who studies race and medicine during the late twentieth century, and I now work at a community development non-profit in North Minneapolis where we work to end racial inequalities and improve community health through the provision of dignified, affordable housing and providing opportunities for increased civic participation. Drawing largely from my own research in Detroit that found black physicians were systematically excluded from educational opportunities, and therefore economic success, well into the 1990s, I argue that instead of diversity and inclusion, we must be talking about equity and justice. Where diversity in our conversation is about recognizing and accommodating differences within academia, equity ensures that there is fairness so that people representing those differences are able to thrive in a system that is still white and patriarchal. Part of the way that we can work for equity is by using our position as scholars to complete work that advances social justice and challenges hegemonic institutions.