17, Institute of Critical Studies
From Small Beginnings/Global Anti-Eugenics Centre

co-hosted with Colegio de San Ildefonso

Invite to the XL International Colloquium

January 19-24, 2026, Mexico City

Coordinated by:
Beatriz Miranda Galarza and Benedict Ipgrave

Hybrid modality: in-person in Mexico City and via YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Sessions will include simultaneous English translation.

Colegio de San Ildefonso

Justo Sierra 16, Mexico City

Presentation 

Eugenics is often spoken of as a dark chapter of twentieth-century history, associated with racial hygiene, forced sterilization, institutional confinement, colonial domination, the control of women’s bodies and reproduction, and the genocide of those deemed “unfit.” Yet reducing eugenics to a closed historical episode is not only counterintuitive but, above all, dangerous. Eugenics has not disappeared — it has transformed. It has learned to speak the language of science, public health, progress, prevention, and efficiency. It has migrated from laboratories to clinics, from asylums to government institutions, from demographic censuses to algorithms. In this shift, eugenic rationality has embedded itself within 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 the human.

Today, eugenic logic persists in reproductive control, in the pathologization of “disability,” in anti-trans legislation, in population-management policies, in the surveillance of migration, and in discourses of fear around “undesirable births.” It manifests in genetic screening technologies, in fertility markets, and in biotechnological capitalism. It hides within medical protocols, in triage criteria during pandemics, and in strategies addressing the climate crisis — strategies that silently decide who deserves to continue living. Through data profiling and predictive policing, artificial intelligence produces new forms of digital eugenics, classifying, excluding, and ranking lives under the guise of objectivity. These practices are legitimized by narratives of meritocracy, resource scarcity, national security, and references to overpopulation; they are reinforced by cultural imaginaries — cinema, news, and memes — which normalize the idea that some lives are too costly, too dangerous, too dependent, or too different to belong to our recognized communities.

This gathering refuses to treat eugenics as a relic of the past. We approach it as a contemporary and constantly mutating technology that cuts across disability, gender, sexuality, race, class, migration, public health, governance, and the future of species. At the same time, we center the traditions of resistance and creation that have always opposed it: movements for disability justice and reproductive justice; queer and crip critiques; postcolonial and Indigenous struggles; feminist theories; bioethics; critical studies of race and migration; artistic and performative practices; critical approaches to artificial intelligence; and speculative imaginaries that envision ways of life beyond the norm.

This gathering is not limited to asking how eugenics operates; it raises more urgent questions: How can it be dismantled? What does it mean to build worlds in which difference is not corrected, expelled, hidden, sterilized, or domesticated under the rhetoric of “inclusion”, but rather recognized as the very condition of life? Can we imagine forms of care, intimacy, technology, kinship, and community that affirm interdependence as a shared condition?

This colloquium is not only about resisting eugenics — it is about rethinking the ways we measure life. We call for the imagining of futures in which the human is defined by the possibility of existing otherwise.