Tom Keegan analyzes debates in early twentieth-century Freetown, Sierra Leone, where African intellectuals engaged Anglo-American eugenic literature circulating through newspapers, medical advertising, and transatlantic print culture. Far from passively absorbing imperial racial science, editors such as Cornelius May appropriated eugenic classifications to critique colonial governance and assert African political capacity. By reframing infant mortality and sexual regulation as consequences of colonial disruption rather than racial inferiority, they inverted the epistemic tools of empire to argue for African self-rule.

Leigh Alon turns to the United States, where American Jewish physicians confronted the rise of antisemitism in response to the large waves of Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on published medical writings and private correspondence, the paper shows that physicians across ideological divides converged in rejecting hereditarian conceptions of Jewishness. By leveraging medical authority to dispute the biological basis of racial difference, they sought to secure Jewish civic belonging and undermine eugenic claims that rendered Jewish bodies permanently distinct.

Shifting to the postcolonial Middle East, Carter Barnett situates Coptic Orthodox debates on contraception within the context of state-sponsored family planning initiatives in early Republican Egypt. Rather than interpreting Coptic bioethics solely as theological exchange with global Christianity, the paper argues that reproductive discourse reflected anxieties about communal continuity and state intrusion into family life. Endorsing artificial contraception became a way to reconcile Christian doctrine with national citizenship while safeguarding confessional autonomy in a rapidly nationalizing state.

Finally, Katherine Booska explores how post-Holocaust American humanist Judaism reconfigured the value of human life through biological language. Focusing on Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Jewish Renewal, it demonstrates how Jewish thinkers mobilized concepts drawn from psychology and humanism to expand ethical obligation beyond the Jewish community. In grounding moral worth in biological existence itself, they articulated a universalizing vision of human life shaped by the trauma of genocide.

Together, these papers argue that biological discourse was not merely a tool of domination but also a medium of minority self-fashioning. By tracing how communities appropriated scientific language, the panel contributes to ongoing historiographical conversations about the social life of scientific knowledge, the politics of reproduction, and the entanglement of religion and modern state power. In centering actors who navigated scientific modernity from positions of marginality, this panel reframes the history of eugenics and biopolitics as a field shaped not only by coercion but also by negotiation and resistance.