Dehumanization series: Science and societial biases
Description
As the Gen-Zers say, we live in a society. And so do scientists, which means that science is never truly bias-free...despite frequent claims otherwise. To be trauma-informed, however, we have to pay attention to that man behind the curtain. Cause sometimes, research is based in dehumanizing societal biases. And treatments based in that research ends up harming people.
This episode covers:
- A model of dehumanization to conceptualize different types of rhetoric (animalistic and mechanistic).
- Historical examples of this rhetoric in scientific writings of the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Modern examples of similar dehumanizing rhetoric in scientific writings of the 21st century on a clinical population of high interest to us. *coughcough*autistics*cough*
About Us:
The Trauma-Informed SLP website
Our socials:
References:
Peer-Reviewed articles:
Botha, M. (2021). Academic, activist, or advocate? Angry, entangled, and emerging: A critical reflection on autism knowledge production. Frontiers in psychology, 4196.
Botha, M., & Cage, E. (2022). “Autism research is in crisis”: A mixed method study of researcher’s constructions of autistic people and autism research. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 7397.
Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and social psychology review, 10(3), 252-264.
Milton, D. E. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & society, 27(6), 883-887.
Solomon, M. (1985). The rhetoric of dehumanization: An analysis of medical reports of the Tuskegee syphilis project. Western journal of speech communication, 49(4), 233-247.
Other references:
Dehumanizing Always Starts With Language (Brené Brown, 2018)
On Louis Agassiz: Wikipedia's entry and Saima S. Iqbal's Harvard Crimson article
On Samuel George Morton: Wikipedia's entry and George Mason University's page of quotes
Harvard’s Eugenics Era (Adam S. Cohen, 2016)
Scientific Racism (Harvard Library)
Skulls in print: scientific racism in the transatlantic world
United States
