Project: Eugenics and the Body

About the project

Eugenics has priorititised academic intellect and western forms of knowledge, as documented by the UCL Research. “It has valorised ignorance as rationality and has pushed out other knowledges by discrediting the flesh that carries them” (Taylor, 2023, p.33). In the spirit of Foluke Taylor’s (2023) call to “dare to create theory” from people’s lived experiences, I aim to work with the bodies that have not been systemically heard by the popular discourse, and perform the theory it creates.

This project will invite a group of students who are first or second generation migrants and people of colour to share their experiences of learning in Western academic institutions, doing so in a therapeutic space using creative arts as a medium of exploration, looking at the intersectionalities of their experience and hoping to engage with anti-racist discourse.

The practice and work proposed will operate at three different levels: personal, interpersonal, and systemic. Dramatherapist Renee Emunah (1994) talks about the safe space of a therapy room as a rehearsal space to practice which can then be taken outside in the ‘real’ world. At the personal level, the project aims to co create a safe space to explore and process their experiences with themselves and with other group members. At an interpersonal level, it aims to support their confidence in being their authentic knowledgeable selves in the world outside the therapeutic space. Having been accepted in their ways in a therapeutic space and having used that as a practice ground, the hope is that the participants then can have brave conversations outside the space. It will also seek to have a sense of solidarity within the space, and thus hopefully create more solidarities outside the space. At a systemic level, it aims to share experiences of the participants through a performance, and an exhibition of the material created during the therapy process, to create systemic dialogues and bring such experiences into focus of our everyday conversations.

This project hopes to create solidarity, and acceptance towards various knowledges and ways of thinking amongst those who come across it. hooks (1994) talks about theory as a location for healing. Thus, my hope is for the project to co-create the kind of theory that people can come to, and feel held in their knowledge and thus to some extent healed.

Emunah, R. (1994), Acting for Real: Drama Therapy Process, Technique, and Performance, Brunner-Routledge

hooks, b. (1994), Teaching to transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge

Taylor, F. (2023), Unruly Therapeutic, Norton Books