ELEP Research Seminar: Dr Bethsaida Nieves

Title: Determining Biological Citizenship: Creating and Effacing Difference in Puerto Rico’s Education. Speaker: Dr Bethsaida Nieves. Host: Helen Knowler, UCL's Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP). Abstract: Dr Nieves' work analyses the ways in which institutional practices gave legitimacy to conceptualisations of difference in Puerto Rico’s schooling and society. She examine the ways in which discourses of difference provided educators with information about whom the Puerto Rican child was or could become. These epistemological and ontological reference points shifted under the first years of civil colonial rule, which constructed a state of liminal governmentality in Puerto Rico’s education and society. For Puerto Rico’s case, sustained avoidance became a tactic for governing, which has kept Puerto Rico in a state of suspended sovereignty since the turn of the twentieth century.