CFUW Victoria General Meeting

Guest speaker:

Biography

Claudia Malacrida is an Emeritus Professor and Board of Governors Research Chair at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of several books on disability, health and the body, including Mourning the Dreams: Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Early Infant Death (Left Coast Press), Sociology of the Body: a Reader (Oxford University Press), Cold Comfort: Mothers, Professionals and ADHD (University of Toronto Press), and A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years (University of Toronto Press).

Institutional Life and Disabled Children Canada – Survivors’ Stories

Drawing on rare interviews with former inmates and workers, institutional records, and governmental archives, Claudia Malacrida illuminates the dark history of the treatment of “mentally defective” children and adults in twentieth-century Alberta. Focusing on the Michener Centre in Red Deer, one of the last such facilities to close in Canada, A Special Hell is a sobering account of the connection between institutionalization and eugenics.

Malacrida explains how isolating the Michener Centre’s residents from their communities served as a form of passive eugenics that complemented the active eugenics program of the Alberta Eugenics Board. Instead of receiving an education, inmates worked for little or no pay – sometimes in homes and businesses in Red Deer – under the guise of vocational rehabilitation. The success of this model resulted in huge institutional growth, chronic crowding, and terrible living conditions that included both routine and extraordinary abuse.

AGENDA

January 21, 2024 Meeting Minutes