Between Welfare, Emancipation, and Body Politics

Eugenic and Colonial Racist Thinking in the Women's Movement and Social Work from the 1890s to the 1960s

Project duration: 01/01/2026 - 31/12/2026

Principal investigator: Dr. Dayana Lau

Project staff: Fallon Tiffany Cabral, Friederike Mehl, Anouk Widder

Partners: 

• Prof. Dr. Tahani Nadim and Katja Teichmann, queer*feminist library and archive LIESELLE, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Abstract:
The project combines the digitization and archival description of historical sources with archival teaching practices. In this way, the digital archive at the Alice Salomon Archive (ASA) will be further developed with an emphasis on users' needs and perspectives. The starting point of the project is the digitization and online presentation of key works by Alice Salomon in the public domain, as well as a small selection of books on her life and work that are out of print. In addition, the cataloguing of journals and articles at the ASA is being revised with the aim of generating metadata that can be presented at the metadatabase META-Katalog.eu for the first time.

The digitized texts form the basis of a seminar at ASH Berlin University of Applied Sciences. In the seminar, students use Alice Salomon's writings and other archival documents to examine colonial racist and eugenic thinking within the bourgeois German women's movement and the social work practices that were developed by the same women. The seminar will cooperate with a parallel course in gender studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The latter seminar will center around discourses in the so called second wave feminist movement in Germany and work with archival holdings of the queer*feminist library and archive LIESELLE Bochum. This archival cooperation aims to highlight continuities in racist and exclusionary politics within the feminist spectrum. An evaluation of the students' archival experience then serves to develop recommendations for feminist archives that critically address the factor of discrimination when working at archives, particularly in dealing with histories of eugenics and colonial racism. The results will be published as a short guide that will be publically available and that aims to empower archival users.

Funding: Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv (DDF)

Keywords: Digitization, Archival Description, Eugenics, Colonial Racism, Alice Salomon

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