Uncomfortable (Bodies in the Archive)
Students, faculty and staff were invited to reflect on the Human Betterment Foundation, recently revealed as a program of eugenics begun at Caltech in the 1930s.
Uncomfortable... followed an earlier virtual session "Sitting Down with Uncomfortable Things in the Caltech Archives”, where post-doctoral students and faculty presented their reflections on digitized artifacts in the history of Caltech representing exclusion, inequality, and discrimination. Uncomfortable... continued the inquiry to explore how these histories live within each of us as traumatic emotion, sensation and memory, blocking us from inspired creative visioning. “If we recognized our somatic experience might we shift from blindly believing in the inevitability of social exclusion to envisioning options towards transformative social change?”
This presentation is part of “Critical Intersections: Conversations on Race, History, and Science”, inaugurated in 2020 by Caltech - Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, to respond reflectively to systemic and historical structures of inequality - organized by Maura Dykstra, Assistant Professor of History; Jennifer Jahner, Professor of English; Hillary Mushkin, Research Professor of Art and Design; and University Archivist Peter Collopy.
LA TIMES Column: Caltech’s effort to confront its racist past hits a snag