Reconsidering Eugenics in Science and Religion Scholarship

This roundtable discussion will offer, to a wide variety of scholars across numerous subfields, a broad conversation about the role of eugenics in scholarship on science and religion.  We aim to reconsider the history and present of the field “science and religion”—as practiced by theologians, philosophers, historians, and others—and its entanglements with eugenic ideologies and organizations, particularly but not exclusively in the early– and mid-twentieth century. In so doing, we seek to bring critical scholarship on eugenics into conversation with religious studies. Bioessentialist attempts to control heredity have been a feature of U.S. and global politics for more than a century, and they are on the rise. Scholars of religion, science, and technology need frameworks and vocabularies for addressing eugenics in their research and teaching. We aim to generate a productive conversation about where our field has been and where it ought to go.