“Chronic Commons” Community Workshop

Eugenics was a popular American movement that believed that only certain bodies are worthy. Public health policies of the late 19th and 20th century pulsed with a “eugenics impulse” that held certain lives and bodies above others. Medical science was used  to manage the reproductive, physical, and relational freedoms of the US population.

This impulse remains. While Eugenics as an organized movement has been discredited and disavowed, medical research practices as well as economic and public health policies continue to exclude ways of being: the chronically ill, the disabled, women and men of color, immigrants, and women.

These communities of the excluded, however, possess their own impulses and coalitions, forged in the fire of survival against long odds.

Join us for a participatory workshop and conversation that moves to counter this eugenics impulse, to seed the soil from which can grow a tree of life that holds both scars and dreams, knowledge and embodiment, fortitude and breath.