From 1928 to 1972, the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, Canada’s lengthiest eugenic policy, shaped social discourses and medical practice in the province. Sterilization programs—particularly involuntary sterilization programs—were responding both nationally and internationally to social anxieties produced by the perceived connection between mental degeneration and heredity. Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics illustrates how the emerging field of psychiatry and its concerns about inheritable conditions was heavily influenced by eugenic thought and contributed to the longevity of sterilization practices in Western Canada. Using institutional case studies, biographical accounts, and media developments from Western Canada and Europe, contributors trace the impact of eugenics on nursing practices, politics, and social attitudes, while investigating the ways in which eugenics discourses persisted unexpectedly and remained mostly unexamined in psychiatric practice. This volume further extends historical analysis into considerations of contemporary policy and human rights issues through a discussion of disability studies as well as compensation claims for victims of sterilization. In impressive detail, contributors shed new light on the medical and political influences of eugenics on psychiatry at a key moment in the field’s development. With contributions by Ashley Barlow, W. Mikkel Dack, Diana Mansell, Guel A. Russell, Celeste Tuong Vy Sharpe, Henderikus J. Stam, Douglas Wahlsten, Paul J. Weindling, Robert A. Wilson, Gregor Wolbring, and Marc Workman.

"From 1928 to 1972, the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, Canada's lengthiest eugenic policy, shaped social discourses and medical practice in the province. Sterilization programs--particularly involuntary sterilization programs--were responding both nationally and internationally to social anxieties produced by the perceived connection between mental degeneration and heredity. Psychiatry and the Legacy of Eugenics illustrates how the emerging field of psychiatry and its concerns about inheritable conditions was heavily influenced by eugenic thought and contributed to the longevity of sterilization practices in Western Canada. Using institutional case studies, biographical accounts, and media developments from Western Canada and Europe, contributors trace the impact of eugenics on nursing practices, politics, and social attitudes, while investigating the ways in which eugenics discourses persisted unexpectedly and remained mostly unexamined in psychiatric practice. This volume further extends historical analysis into considerations of contemporary policy and human rights issues through a discussion of disability studies as well as compensation claims for victims of sterilization. In impressive detail, contributors shed new light on the medical and political influences of eugenics on psychiatry at a key moment in the field's development."--

There is virtually nowhere on earth that remains untouched by plastics and the situation presents a serious threat to our natural world. Despite the magnitude of the problem, the interventions most often put in place are consumer-led and market-based and only nominally capable of addressing the issue. As the problem worsens and neoliberal ideologies limit the world’s responses to this crisis, there is a growing need for legislative frameworks that attend to the complex social and ecological issues associated with plastics. The contributors to this volume bring expertise from across academic disciplines to illustrate how plastics are produced, consumed, and discarded and to find holistic and integrated approaches that demonstrate an understanding of the wide-ranging problem. From the plasticization of earth’s oceans to the endocrine disrupting chemicals that have the potential to seriously harm life as we know it, these essays beg the question that we all must answer: what is our plastic legacy? With contributions by: Imogen E. Napper, Sabine Pahl, Richard C. Thompson, Sasha Adkins, Stephanie B. Borrelle, Jennifer Provencher, Tina Ngata, Sven Bergmann, Christina Gerhardt, Elyse Stanes, Tridibesh Dey, Mike Michael, Laura McLauchlan, Johanne Tarpgaard, Deirdre McKay, Padmapani Perez, Lei Xiaoyu, and John Holland.

Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset. --

In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement won many supporters with its promise that social ills such as venereal disease, alcoholism, and so-called feeble-mindedness, along with many other conditions, could be eliminated by selective human breeding and other measures. The provinces of Alberta and British Columbia passed legislation requiring that certain “unfit” individuals undergo reproductive sterilization. Ontario, being home to many leading proponents of eugenics, came close to doing the same. In the Public Good examines three legal processes that were used to advance eugenic ideas in Ontario between 1910 and 1938: legislative bills, provincial royal commissions, and the criminal trial of a young woman accused of distributing birth control information. Taken together, they reveal who in the province supported these ideas, how they were understood in relation to the public good, and how they were debated. Elizabeth Koester shows the ways in which the law was used both to promote and to deflect eugenics, and how the concept of the public good was used by supporters to add power to their cause. With eugenic thinking finding new footholds in the possibilities offered by reproductive technologies, proposals to link welfare entitlement to “voluntary” sterilization, and concerns about immigration, In the Public Good adds depth to our understanding. Its exploration of the historical relationship between eugenics and law in Ontario prepares us to face the implications of “newgenics” today.

From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the local population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban came to be known as institutional psychotherapy and would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought. In Disalienation, Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

In recent decades, developments in research technologies and therapeutic advances have generated immense public recognition for neuroscience. However, its origins as a field, often linked to partnerships and projects at various brain-focused research centres in the United States during the 1960s, can be traced much further back in time. In A New Field in Mind Frank Stahnisch documents and analyzes the antecedents of the modern neurosciences as an interdisciplinary field. Although postwar American research centres, such as Francis O. Schmitt's Neuroscience Research Program at MIT, brought the modern field to prominence, Stahnisch reveals the pioneering collaborations in the early brain sciences at centres in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in the first half of the twentieth century. One of these, Heinrich Obersteiner's institute in Vienna, began its work in the 1880s. Through case studies and collective biographies, Stahnisch investigates the evolving relationships between disciplines – anatomy, neurology, psychiatry, physiology, serology, and neurosurgery – which created new epistemological and social contexts for brain research. He also shows how changing political conditions in Central Europe affected the development of the neurosciences, ultimately leading to the expulsion of many physicians and researchers under the Nazi regime and their migration to North America. An in-depth and innovative study, A New Field in Mind tracks the emergence and evolution of neuroscientific research from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period.

A Violent History of Benevolence traces how normative histories of liberalism, progress, and social work enact and obscure systemic violences. Chris Chapman and A.J. Withers explore how normative social work history is structured in such a way that contemporary social workers can know many details about social work's violences, without ever imagining that they may also be complicit in these violences. Framings of social work history actively create present-day political and ethical irresponsibility, even among those who imagine themselves to be anti-oppressive, liberal, or radical. The authors document many histories usually left out of social work discourse, including communities of Black social workers (who, among other things, never removed children from their homes involuntarily), the role of early social workers in advancing eugenics and mass confinement, and the resonant emergence of colonial education, psychiatry, and the penitentiary in the same decade. Ultimately, A Violent History of Benevolence aims to invite contemporary social workers and others to reflect on the complex nature of contemporary social work, and specifically on the present-day structural violences that social work enacts in the name of benevolence.

Well into the 1980s, Strasbourg, France, was the site of a curious and little-noted experiment: Ungemach, a garden city dating back to the high days of eugenic experimentation that offered luxury living to couples who were deemed biologically fit and committed to contractual childbearing targets. Supported by public authorities, Ungemach aimed to accelerate human evolution by increasing procreation among eugenically selected parents. In this fascinating history, Paul-André Rosental gives an account of Ungemach’s origins and its perplexing longevity. He casts a troubling light on the influence that eugenics continues to exert—even decades after being discredited as a pseudoscience—in realms as diverse as developmental psychology, postwar policymaking, and liberal-democratic ideals of personal fulfilment.

Will revolutionize reader's understanding of the principles of modern genetics, Nazi racial policies and the relationship between them.