Race science: Undiscovered Power of Building the Nations

In cooperation with Southeast European History and Anthropology, University of Graz Dr. I am going to revisit the history of race science in Central Eastern European countries. Those engaged in the study of the history of race science often encounter the dilemma of local vs. global though scientific racism seems to be ubiquitous, its performance varies in terms of temporal, ideological, and spatial boundaries. Recognizing these contexts predisposes mastering the bad past of the sciences historically closed to racism. While the role of race science in Western countries, especially in Germany and USA, started to be accepted as the apotheosis of its malign influence, in other regions including Central Eastern European countries the impact of eugenics and physical anthropology, the main vehicles of race science, is opposed to this negative benchmark. This unduly abundant contrast relegates the legacy of race science with the margins of contemporary historical reflections. Despite the obvious systematic segregation against ethnic minorities and people with disabilities in the past and present of CEE countries, understanding the legacy of race science remains in tethers. The task to critically revise the legacy of race science shall remain unattended until the ongoing reproduction of overt and enlightened scientific racism is explored beyond historical contexts. In order to solve this task, I bring into analytical focus the interrogation between race science and nation-building. The core of races science, providing the theorized arguments in favor of various hierarchies of population subgroups, makes it an indispensable tool for nation- building. Concurrently, many realms of scientific knowledge such as developmental psychology, genetics, population studies were shaped by serving the interests of statehood and the nation. While this operation of race science as an agent and structure of nation- building seems to be universal, the specifics of race science in CEE countries call for revisiting the trajectories of shaping the states and nations. In this project, I focus on Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia; the countries where nationalism developed from being peripheral to becoming unified. Along with this comparability, during my previous studies, I gathered credible evidences of inter-country cooperation among racially minded scholars of these countries that inclined me to recognize a complex transnational setting of race science, which ensured the reproduction of race science in these countries after 1945. By gathering and interpreting data about the most prominent scholars and academic projects, I explore how race science at intra-country and global levels responded to the most urgent calls pertaining to nation-building. Mainly, my work traces the course of the analogy between ethnicity and disability; one of the longest-serving metaphors elaborated by racially minded scholars in this region.

The project has illuminated the contribution of race science to the politics of Central and Eastern European (CEE) states concerning minorities, people with disabilities, and women since the end of the nineteenth century and until nowadays. The development of racialized arguments provided by CEE experts has been analyzed through the lenses of international networking among scholars and the involvement of racially minded thinkers from the CEE region in the global agenda of health security. Along with tracing the interrelation of nation-building and race science, the project revises the recent and current attempts to deconstruct racial thinking and politics legitimized by scientific racism. Interlinking these narratives concerning the circulation of knowledge, the project examines different strategies for historicizing racial thinking as the ground for reestablishing epistemic justice. The monograph "Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between critical whiteness and epistemic injustice", written in cooperation with Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, one of the main outputs of the project, elaborates the application of this approach to the history of segregation of Romani people. The book offers possible grounds for answering the question: "How to pose the struggle against 'anti-Gypsyism,' if claims of eliminating racism seem to be unrealistic or, even more, seem to bring risks to historical justice for Romani people?" The perspective of critical whiteness offered by the book, as a possible answer to this question, is constructed as the critical transformation of collective identities as well as the ways to translate them to the public. The project has also shed light on the public ramifications of race science through exploring health films produced in CEE, mainly in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as agents and structures of the nation-building process. Two forthcoming outcomes, the monograph entitled "A critical history of health film in Eastern Europe and beyond", co-authored with Karl Kaser, along with a database of health films, reconstruct the role of health propaganda as one of the most influential channels for translating racial ideas and practicing surveillance at the national and global levels of health security. The project highlights not only the role of Western patterns in health films in CEE countries but also elaborates the impact of the CEE filmmakers on producing films for minorities and peripheral populations around the world. The project devotes special attention to the institutionalization of women reflected in the health films and fixed through their dissemination as a gender-based violation of rights and its various manifestations, typical of post-socialist Europe. The project has established the grounds for future research, which will focus on the intersectionality of race, disability, and gender in medical research and its critical acceptance by experts from other fields as the grounds for accepting collective responsibilities for injustice in CEE countries and beyond.