Promotional Information

An examination of eugenic thinking past and present, from forced sterilization to prenatal screening, drawing on experience with those who survived eugenics.

Table of Contents

I Eugenic Activities: Probing Eugenics 1 
1 Standpointing Eugenics 3
2 Characterizing Eugenics 25
3 Specifying Eugenic Traits 51
4 Subhumanizing the Targets of Eugenics 77
II Eugenic Variations: The Persistence of Eugenics 99
5 Where Do Ideas of Human Variation Come From? 101
6 A Socio-cognitive Framework for Marked Variation 121
7 Black Doors, Newgenics, and Eugenics Underground 141
8 Eugenics as Wrongful Accusation 167
III Eugenic Voices: Knowing Agency at the Margins 193
9 Knowing Agency 195
10 Eugenics Unbound: Survivorship for the Subhuman 213
Notes 235
References 271
Index 297

About the Author

Robert A. Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at La Trobe University, the author of Genes and the Agents of Life, and coeditor of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences and of Explanation and Cognition (MIT Press). He directed the project that built EugenicsArchive.ca and is a director and the executive producer of the documentary Surviving Eugenics.