Eugenics is often spoken of as a dark chapter of the twentieth century, associated with racial hygiene, forced sterilization, institutional confinement, colonial domination, the control of bodies and of women’s reproduction, and the genocide of those deemed “unfit.” However, reducing eugenics to a closed historical episode is not only counterintuitive but, above all, dangerous. Eugenics has not disappeared; it has transformed itself. It has learned to speak the language of science, public health, progress, prevention, and efficiency. It migrated from laboratories to clinics, from asylums to governmental institutions, from demographic censuses to algorithms. In this displacement, eugenic rationality became embedded in the normative frameworks through which we define the value of life: normality, productivity, beauty, intelligence, risk, and even our very understanding of truth and of what it means to be human.

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Today, eugenic logic persists in reproductive control, in the pathologization of disability, in anti-trans legislation, in population-management policies, in migration surveillance, and in discourses of fear surrounding so-called “undesirable births.” It manifests itself in genetic screening technologies, fertility markets, and biotechnological capitalism. It is concealed in medical protocols, in triage criteria implemented during public health emergencies, and in certain responses to the climate crisis that silently decide which lives deserve to be sustained. Through data profiling and forms of predictive policing, artificial intelligence produces new modalities of digital eugenics, classifying, excluding, and hierarchizing lives under the promise of objectivity. These practices are legitimized through discourses of meritocracy, resource scarcity, and security, and are reinforced by cultural imaginaries—cinema, media, digital narratives—that normalize the idea that some lives are too costly, too risky, or too dependent to be fully recognized as part of the political community.

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This colloquium proposes not to treat eugenics as a residue of the past, but to approach it as a contemporary rationality in constant transformation, one that cuts transversally across disability, gender, sexuality, race, class, migration, public health, governance, and projections of the future of societies and species. At the same time, the gathering places at its center the traditions of thought, resistance, and creation that have historically confronted eugenics, including disability justice and reproductive justice movements, feminist, queer, and crip critiques, postcolonial and Indigenous struggles, critical bioethics, race and migration studies, artistic and performative practices, critical approaches to artificial intelligence, and speculative imaginations that open the possibility of ways of life beyond the norm.

 

More than merely describing how eugenics operates, this colloquium formulates questions oriented toward its dismantling: what does it mean to construct social, normative, and cultural frameworks in which difference is not corrected, expelled, concealed, or domesticated under rhetorics of inclusion? How can we imagine forms of care, technology, kinship, and community that recognize interdependence as a constitutive condition of social life?

 

In this sense, the colloquium is not conceived solely as a space of resistance to eugenics, but as an invitation to rethink the criteria by which life is measured and valued. It calls for thinking futures in which the human is defined by the possibility of existing otherwise, under conditions of dignity, plurality, and shared care.

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You can follow the discussions of the colloquium below in English or in Spanish...