Colloquium: A “necessary fiction”? Naming and Unnaming Mongolism

• In-Person event
• A715, Loeb Building, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

• Contact
• Soc-Anthro@cunet.carleton.ca

What might it mean to expunge the medical category mongolism (now Down syndrome) entirely? In this talk, Martin uses Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1980 story “She Unnames Them” to approach this speculative possibility through the lens of human differentiation in two closely linked episodes. The first is physician John Langdon Down’s original labour of “making up” Mongolian Imbecility in the 1860s, and the second is an effort led by geneticist Curt Stern, in 1960, to unname mongolism. Publications and archival sources from each instance offer a window into the contingencies of kind-making and language choice, and the intransigence of named categories once they are set in motion. Mongolism is ineluctably a colonial perversion, and the eponymous “Down syndrome” hardly displaces its problematic genealogy. To unname – speculatively or intermittently or literally – contains the liberatory potential of unraveling a human kind.

Following her presentation, Dr. Aryn Martin will be joined in conversation with discussants Dr. Carlos Novas and PhD candidate Megan Linton from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. This departmental colloquium was jointly organized with the Carleton Disability and Access Studies Hub (C-DASH).

Biography of Speaker: Aryn Martin is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto. A scholar of feminist STS, Martin has published on a range of topics in the history and sociology of biomedicine in journals such as Social Studies of Science, Social Problems, Biosocieties, Body & Society and Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.