Eugenics Archives Canada 2010-2015

Professor in the History of Medicine

University of Michigan

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Associate Professor in the Department of History

York University

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Professor in the History of Medicine

Oxford Brookes University

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Research professor at the Department of Health Services Research

University of Copenhagen

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Professor of Law

Georgia State University

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Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Science and Adjunct Professor in the Division of Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine

University of Alberta

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Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Extension and an Adjunct Assistant Professor with the Centre for Health Promotion Studies

University of Alberta

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ARC Research Fellow in the School of History and Philosophy

University of New South Wales

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Physical anthropologist and privacy law specialist

Web Site

Erika is an associate professor and a tier 2 Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. In 1997, she received her BA from Dalhousie University, Canada. Erika received a MA in 2000 from the University of Saskatchewan, and she received her Ph.D in 2005 from McMaster University, Canada.

Erika is a bright, young historian with a penchant for working collaboratively with marginalized groups to uncover questionable practices in the history of medicine. In particular, she has written extensively on the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs to treat psychiatric patients during the mid-twentieth century in the prarie provinces of Western Canada. Among her specific interests in the history of medicine, Erika includes psychiatry and mental health, eugenics, deinstitutionalization, medical experimentation and moral regulation. She is currently engaged in two major research projects related to the history of mental health and psychiatry in western Canada. One is a CIHR-funded collaborative project on the history of the closure of long-stay mental hospitals, called Open Doors/Closed Ranks: Locating Mental Health after the Asylum. The second project, funded by SSHRC, she hopes will culminate in a monograph called Eugenic Frontiers, which compares popular and political attitudes towards eugenic sterilization in Alberta and Saskatchewan from 1920 to 1975.

Still in the early stages of her career, Erika has published a great deal on issues related to the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada project. Below is a sample of some of those writings.

• Building an 'Ideal Society': Mixing Politics and Health in Canadian Prairie Society. The Annual Review of Canadian Studies [Japanese Association for Canadian Studies] (2009) 7: 59-71.
• Prairies, Psychedelics and Place: The Dynamics of Region in Psychiatric Research. Health and Place (2009) 15(3): 888-94.
• Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
• co-authored with John Mills, Trust Amply Recompensed�: Psychological Research At Weyburn Saskatchewan, 1957-1961. Journal for the History of Behavioural Studies (2008) 44(3): 199-218.
• Land of the Living Sky with Diamonds: A Place for Radical Psychiatry? Journal of Canadian Studies (2007) 41(3): 42-66.
• Hitting Highs at Rock Bottom: LSD Treatment for Alcoholism, 1950-1970. Social History of Medicine, (2006) 19(2): 313-29.
• Psychedelic Pioneers�: Mental Health Research in Saskatchewan, 1945-1967. in J. Moran and D. Wright (eds) "Mental Health and Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives". Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 2006: 221-44.
• Flashback: Psychiatric Experimentation with LSD in Historical Perspective. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry (2005) 50(7): 381-8.

For more on Erika, visit herWeb Site

Associate professor of Critical Disabilities and Health Ethics

York University

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Archives Specialist

Dalhousie University

Associate Archivist (Private Records)

University of Alberta

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Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Community Health Sciences and the Department of History

University of Calgary

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Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing

University of Alberta

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Associate Professor in the Department of History

York University

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Professor of Law

Georgia State University

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Professor in the History of Medicine

Oxford Brookes University

Web Site

Neighbourhood Bridges

Sterilization survivor

The first person to file a successful law suit against the province of Alberta, Canada for wrongful sterilization under the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta.

Edmonton, Alberta

blog

Associate Professor for the departments of Public Health Sciences and Philosophy

University of Alberta

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Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Extension and an Adjunct Assistant Professor with the Centre for Health Promotion Studies

University of Alberta

Web Site

ARC Research Fellow in the School of History and Philosophy

University of New South Wales

Web Site

Professor

Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science - Macquarie University, Sydney Australia

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Professional Fine Artist

Edmonton, Alberta

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Associate Professor in the Department of History

York University

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Assistant Professor of Social Structure and Social Policy in the Department of Sociology

University of Alberta

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Chief Executive Officer

Alberta Association for Community Living, Edmonton Alberta

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Associate Professor in Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies

University of Calgary

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Visiting scholar with the John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre

University of Alberta

Web Site

Sterilization survivor

Research professor at the Department of Health Services Research

University of Copenhagen

Web Site

Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Science and Adjunct Professor in the Division of Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine

University of Alberta

Web Site

The first person to file a successful law suit against the province of Alberta, Canada for wrongful sterilization under the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta.

Edmonton, Alberta

blog

Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature

University of Glasgow

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Professional Fine Artist

Edmonton, Alberta

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Professor - Department of Educational Psychology

University of Alberta

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Gregor is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Medicine with the Department of Community Health Sciences in the Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies Program at the University of Calgary, Canada. He is a part-time professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, Canada; an adjunct faculty member in the Critical Disability Studies Department at the University of York, Canada; and a founding member and distinguished scholar with the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University, United States. He wrote his Ph.D Thesis from 1989 & #150; 1992 at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Frankfurt a.M and the University of Frankfurt a.M., Germany.

Gregor is both a bioethicist and a biochemist, a philosopher and a scientist, a historian and an expert on nanotechnology. He is as likely to be interested in discussing the moral implications of prenatal genetic screening as he is in discussing the structure of a protein molecule. Among his many and varied interests, Gregor includes ability and ableism; the history of thalidomide and thalidomiders; the social, legal, and ethical issues surrounding science and technology; nanoscale technology and molecular manufacturing; aging, immortality, and transhumanism; and personhood and human rights.

Gregor has written prolificly on these subjects over the last 10 years, producing more than 20 book chapters, 30 peer-reviewed articles, and 70 non-peer-reviewed articles. Here is just a sample of some of the recent work Gregor has done related to the project, Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada:

• NBICS and Public Health.[May 15, 2009 - published by Healthwrights]
• BioBanks.[February 28, 2009 - published by Healthwrights]
• Brain-Machine Interfaces -- An Update.[February 15, 2009]
• Nanocancer Update.[January 30, 2009 - published by Healthwrights]
• Metagenomics.[January 15, 2009]
• NBICS and Geo-Engineering.[December 15, 2008]
• Ableism and Anti-Environmentalism: Rights for Nature?[November 30, 2008 - published by Healthwrights]
• International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition 2008.[November 15, 2008]
• NBICS and Faith.[October 30, 2008 - published by Healthwrights]
• Synthetic Biology 4.0.[October 15, 2008]
• Nanoenergy.[September 15, 2008]
• Telehealth, Medicine and Care and the Military.[August 30, 2008 - published by Healthwrights]
• Molecular Manufacturing.[August 15, 2008]

For more information on Gregor, visit his Web Site

Associate Professor in Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies

University of Calgary

Web Site

Associate professor of Critical Disabilities and Health Ethics

York University

Web Site

Professor - Department of Educational Psychology

University of Alberta

Web Site

Visiting scholar with the John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre

University of Alberta

Web Site

Assistant Professor of Social Structure and Social Policy in the Department of Sociology

University of Alberta

Web Site

Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Science and Adjunct Professor in the Division of Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine

University of Alberta

Web Site

Associate Professor in the Humanities Computing Program and the Department of English and Film Studies

University of Alberta

Web Site

Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Community Health Sciences and the Department of History

Michael Billinger

Creative Director

Silversky Solutions - Edmonton Alberta

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Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing

University of Alberta

Web Site

Associate Professor in the Humanities Computing Program and the Department of English and Film Studies

University of Alberta

Web Site

Physical anthropologist and privacy law specialist

University of Alberta

Web Site

Archives Specialist

Dalhousie University

Associate Archivist (Private Records)

University of Alberta

Web Site

Associate Professor for the departments of Public Health Sciences and Philosophy

University of Alberta

Web Site

Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Extension and an Adjunct Assistant Professor with the Centre for Health Promotion Studies

University of Alberta

Web Site

Research Assistant, Humanities Computing

University of Alberta

Web Site

Sheila's research interests include intellectual and gender history, as well as the history of social movements. Her proposed thesis topic examines the relationship between rural women and the Alberta eugenics movement, particularly focusing on how these first-wave feminists dealt with ideological tension between their gender role, legal goals, and eugenic platform.

Fourth Year History Major (Honours)

Heroes and Villains in Alberta Eugenics

Justin provided content for the Heroes and Villains module. This module highlights the centrality of individual characters in the history of Eugenics in Alberta. It sets out to demonstrate the importance of their ideas and work while also emphasizing the complexity of their contributions to this history in presenting both a "heroic" and a "villainous" side of each individual. Justin’s work focused on three significant and controversial figures: John M. MacEachran, Robert C. Wallace and Leonard J. LeVann.

Third Year Political Studies Major, History minor

The Prairie Messenger: A Catholic Perspective on Eugenics In Western Canada

The Prairie Messenger is a weekly publication from the Catholic community in Muenster, SK. By gathering articles from 1923-1975, this community's perspective on sterilization, eugenics, and mental health comes into focus. The religious perspective is vital to a rounded understanding of medical history and gives us insight into the social context of eugenic sterilization.

Third year History major, accepted to Education

Examining Newspapers and Exploring Relationships: Zotero Revised

Over the past two summers, Laura’s project has been to create a bibliography of sources relevant to the history of eugenics, predominantly focused on Alberta and Canada. She has compiled the sources that her and the other interns have gathered through their research and individual projects using a bibliographic database called Zotero; there are approximately 400 sources in the bibliography thus far. Laura also began to search through major Canadian newspaper publications, finding all articles relevant to eugenics and organizing them by topic and category. It is hoped that these articles will later be used to provide content and context for aspects of the larger project.

Fourth year History Major (Honours)

A Snapshot of History: Documents from the Alberta Hospital, Ponoka

Summer 2011 found Amanda sifting through primary documents from the Centennial Centre for Mental Health and Brain Injury (formerly the Provincial Mental Hospital) in Ponoka Alberta. As she worked through files of memoirs, annual reports and other hospital related documents, she created document summaries otherwise known as metadata. The metadata will hopefully allow future researchers to easily evaluate and navigate the documents that are currently held at the Ponoka Museum and aid in future research. These documents are tremendously interesting and are certainly valuable sources for a variety of research topics.

5th year History Major.

Review of the Vital Statistics Annual Reports for Red Deer and Ponoka Mental Hospitals 1925-1972.

Kristina worked in conjunction with Keith Flysak to review and collect the data from the 1925 to 1972 Department of Public Health Annual Reports, specifically those of the Red Deer Provincial Training School, and Provincial Mental Hospital at Ponoka.

Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada Timeline Project

The timeline project is designed to provide a means to present the history of eugenics, and particularly its enaction in Canada, in a manner that allows the public to explore it and related concepts more deeply. It consists of two parallel parts: a traditionally structured timeline, showing the overall progression, and a blog, which provides further information on each event, including multimedia and links to other resources. Both are designed to be updated continually as new information becomes available, and to present relevant current events.

Second Year Philosophy Major

Discussion modules for high school biology

My project involved the creation of discussion modules for high school biology related to ethical issues arising from increased knowledge about the human genome. I created 4 related modules about the Human Genome Project, genetic testing, genetic engineering and eugenics.

Third year Anthropology and Sociology Major

Canadian Colonial History and Eugenics

My project produced a module for the Social 30 Alberta curriculum that revisits Canada’s colonial history from different perspectives. It will be paired with a second module on training schools in Alberta (created by Joelle, another intern) and together these will be called ‘Institutionalization in Western Canada’. Two smaller manifestations of the colonial history project are one photographic contribution to the Collective Memory Project, and a written piece for blogging.

Third year History Major

Institutionalization in Western Canada: The Eugenics Movement

The first project was a Social Studies 30-1 case study which belongs to a two-part module on the history of institutionalization in Western Canada. It emphasizes the role of the Alberta Provincial Training School in the province’s participation in the eugenics movement.

The Language of Eugenics in Alberta

The second project was a timeline which chronicles the evolution of language around eugenics and intellectual disability in Alberta legislation during the 20th century. Most of terms listed are found in laws passed from the 1920s to 1960s governing institutionalization of people with disabilities and management of their estates.

Masters Student in Philosophy

Stuttering and the Construction of the Disabled Speaker

I wrote a paper theorizing stuttering from the angle of disability studies. In this work, I outlined stuttering not as a biological deficiency, but as a distinctly social phenomenon (implicating speakers and hearers) constructed by normative expectations of pace, efficiency and self-mastery which the stutterer fails to uphold. Stuttering is furthermore constructed by assumptions and significations of “proper” speech, and denotes a failure to speak as an impartial and invisible medium for communication.

The Visual Culture of Eugenics: portraiture, mental hygiene and public perceptions

My LAE project for the summer of 2011 was to broaden the scope of research I had previously started, which considered how the use of portrait style photography was used as a tool to promote eugenics to the general public in the 1920s prior to the implementation of the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta (1928). Two new prongs of research have expanded from this point of origin. While venues such as the Edmonton Exhibition displayed goods produced by the residents of provincial training schools and photographs that were meant to show the success of these institutions, other evidence suggests that these images fail to reflect the actual living conditions. As such, the first divergence seeks to address the obvious disparity between the images that were circulated publicly, and those that were circulated privately. The second will be to begin exploring the manner in which portrait photography was also used a tool for documenting and classifying patients within provincial institutions.

3rd Year Doctoral Student, Comparative Literature

Immigration and Eugenics in Western Canada

My project tries to present an overview of the eugenic tendencies that were deployed in the immigration policies of the USA and Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. It is presented as a high school social science module. I was instructed to develop a project with similar topic and idea from last year. While developing the existing project, I added the historical phases of eugenic movement, the influence of the progressive era economists in creating a restricted and exclusive immigration policy and the origin and evolution of “race suicide theory” which established the Anglo-Saxons to be the supreme human race.

“Adult Children” or “Childish Adults” – Children with Disabilities in Childhood Studies

Drawing on Althusser’s and Foucault’s interpretation of power and ideology, my paper looks at image of childhood with disabilities existent in contemporary North American society in relation to the construct of ‘normative’ childhood and the society. I argue that understanding of disability as a ‘transmitting disease’ instead of the kind of personhood turns into fear and anxiety, protected by such notorious practices as institutionalization, sexual sterilization or a residential school program.

4th year History of Art, Design and Visual Culture major

The Collective Memory Project

I organized an exhibition of archival and contemporary visual culture that explores the history and legacy of eugenic thought. Archival materials were displayed in tandem with work by contemporary and emerging artists addressing multifaceted aspects of eugenic thinking. This dialog across communities and personal histories was displayed publicly at the Faculty of Extension in Enterprise Square from Oct. 23- Nov. 23, bringing a varied audience together in an act of collective memory. This exhibition was supplemented in the months leading up to the opening with several discussion groups and open studio times made available to the public. These opportunities provided a space for debate and discussion, providing the resources to bring forgotten histories and diverse perspectives to light.