For the last two hundred years, members of the scientific and medical establishments have represented and misrepresented peoples of different class, sex, race, age and ability in their efforts to chart human variation. This conference will explore how science has been used to evaluate the ‘other’ in society, and will examine the various means by which seemingly objective conclusions were reached concerning whole segments of the population.

Papers presented will include:

‘Institutionalizing the Disabled Other: Social Policy over the ‘Feeble-Minded’ in the United States and Japan and the Turn of the Twentieth Century’

‘Identity, Purity and Otherness in the Praxis of Genealogical Tree Formation in Germany, 1900-1936’

‘The blood groups of the Basques: constructing a new anthropological tool, 1945-1960’

‘Diagnosing Passion in the Tropics: ‘Amok’ and Colonial Classification in British Malaya’

‘Between Data and Experience: Physical Anthropology in the Dutch Indies, 1890s-1920s’

‘Women’s Colleges and the Pursuit of Eugenics in the United States, 1910-1930’

‘Male/Female/Other: 1930s Intersex Research and its Popular dissemination’

‘How to Do the History of Transsexuality in China’

There will also be a concluding keynote address by Dr. Gavin Schaffer (University of Portsmouth) on the topic 'Racial Science and British Society'

For more information, please contact the conference conveners, Elise Juzda (ej243@cam.ac.uk) and Bradley Hart (bh337@cam.ac.uk)

'Scientizing the Other' has been generously supported by the Cambridge University History Faculty and the Trevelyan Fund.