Four Words.

Intelligence. Genetics. Race. Socioeconomic Status.

Four words with complex histories and meanings that ignite discussion and debate.

This blog follows my journey as a PhD Candidate who stands ‘betwixt and between’ the ‘hard’ and ‘social’ sciences. It’s largely a work of bioethics & sociology–focusing on ‘historically burdened concepts’ which carry contested and charged histories into the twenty-first century. By contested and charged, I mean classist and racist eugenic discourses that were designed to delineate and validate at first socioeconomic groups and later racial difference. I do not mean to use ‘historically burdened’ as a euphemistic term for a violent reality, I acknowledge that reality–these words are historically burdened, but they’re also much more.

This blog’s purpose is to help me unpack all that genetics research on cognitive ability/educational attainment/academic achievement might mean for the United States education system and its documented socioeconomic and racial disparities.

To a large extent, this serves as a place for me to ramble, ponder, respond, and question freely. Before I understand what this field of genetics research might mean for US K-12 education and educators, I need to understand what the two fields (education and genomics) themselves say about a certain four words:

Intelligence. Genetics. Race. Socioeconomic Status. 

Let’s begin.