Meet the Team Striving Toward a Eugenics-Free Future

Alana Cattapan (she/her)

Scholar

Alana Cattapan is the Canada Research Chair in the Politics of Reproduction and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. She studies gendered inclusion in policy-making, identifying links between the state, the commercialization of the body, and reproductive labour. She also directs the Politics of Reproduction Research Group at the University of Waterloo. She has published peer-reviewed articles in Studies in Political Economy, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Medical Ethics, among others.

alana.cattapan@uwaterloo.ca

Leslie Digdon (she/her)

National Coordinator

Leslie Digdon (She/Her) is an Assistant Professor of History and Engineering at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her research has focused on the adaption and application of eugenic ideology to the practice of institutionalization as well as the overlap between public health policy and the influence of transnational eugenic theory and discourse.

leslie.digdon@smu.ca

Vincent Auffrey

Grad student/French language coordinator

Vincent F. Auffrey completed a BA in History at the Université de Moncton, in New Brunswick, and an MA in the History of Science at the IHPST. His focus is set primarily on the social history of medicine and the history of eugenics in Canada. Secondary interests include the histories of scientific racism and of anatomy, and the interplay between knowledge and power. Vincent has also worked on the history of Atlantic Canada, especially with regard to Acadian history.

vincent.auffrey@mail.utoronto.ca

Simon Fisher (he/his)

Scholar

Simon Fisher (he/him) is Assistant Professor of United States history at Dalhousie University (Mi'kma'ki/ Halifax, Canada). He received his PhD in Gender and Women's History and African American History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022. His research focuses on the intersectional histories of sexuality, gender, race, and social movements in the 20th-century United States.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril (she/her)

Scholar

Élaina is a crip Filipinx philosopher working in disability bioethics with the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society in the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently working on using a relational ontology lens to analyze long-COVID as a mass disabling event in the context of historical eugenic laws and policies in the UK and Canada.

www.elainagauthiermamaril.com 

 Producer and host of the Philosophy Casting Call podcast, Massively Disabled podcast, and producer and co-host of the Bookshelf Remix and Women of Questionable Morals podcasts.

e.gmamaril@ed.ac.uk

Benedict Ipgrave

International Coordinator

Benedict Ipgrave is currently doing his doctorate at University College London on border relations’ impact upon nationhood in Eastern Europe, having done his MSc on International Relations. He has spent his career working with disabled students at secondary and university level, and teaching in Russia, and has overseen or played an active role in numerous educational, creative and charitable initiatives. He is the founder and programme curator for From Small Beginnings and co-director of the Anti-Eugenics Project.

Abigail Keeping (she/her)

Project Facilitator, Web Developer, and Social Media Manager

Abigail Keeping is an undergraduate student at Saint Mary's University studying criminology and psychology. Her goal is to make C.R.A.S.H an accessible resource for others to learn more about the legacies of eugenics.

Abigail is the recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada Explore Undergraduate Research Award for the summer of 2023.

abigailkeeping.ae@gmail.com

Evadne Kelly

Scholar

Evadne Kelly is an Adjunct Professor at Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, University of Guelph. She is a dance artist, educator, and interdisciplinary scholar who recently led and co-created two projects that expose and counter histories and legacies of eugenics: an exhibition called Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario (recipient of the 2019 Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Award for Excellence in Conservation), and an online knowledge platform called Into the Light: Living Histories of Oppression and Education in Ontario.

Building on her 25 years of professional dance experience, Dr. Kelly focuses her arts-based research and creation work on community-engaged and devised methodologies for social justice aims.

Daniel Meister

Atlantic Region Coordinator

Daniel R. Meister is a historian with a PhD from Queen’s University whose research focuses on the history of multiculturalism in Canada, particularly its racial and eugenic roots. He is the author of "The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism" (MQUP 2021), and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick.

13dm20@queensu.ca

Courtney Mrazek

Fundraising and Event Coordinator

Dr. Courtney Mrazek (she/her) is the W.P. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. Her research focuses on the intersections of public health, health policies, eugenics, and settler colonialism in Atlantic Canada.

Karissa Patton

Scholar

Karissa Patton is a historian of gender, sexuality, health, and activism. She works as an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and Society at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores histories of reproductive and sexual health services, policy, and activism in Canada and the United Kingdom in the late twentieth century. She examines the legacy of eugenics in her work, exploring how both positive and negative eugenic practices shaped various reproductive experiences and types of reproductive activism in the 1960s-1980s.

karissa.patton@gmail.com