The Economization of Life with Michelle Murphy

Today, the CASTAC blog's "Down to a Science" podcast debuts with an interview with historian Michelle Murphy on her new book, The Economization of Life. The goal of this podcast is to serve up scholarship in science studies to a wider audience, even if that wider audience is your class of undergraduates. In this episode, Murphy discusses how in the second half of the 20th century, economic logics were used to continue racist programs of population control when the biological evolutionary logic of eugenics fell out of favor. She argues that programs to "invest in a girl" come out of the same tradition of co-governing economy and population.