Professor Osagie K. Obasogie’s ‘Legacies of Eugenics’ Project

In this episode, host Gwyneth Shaw talks to Professor Osagie K. Obasogie, a professor of law and bioethics and the only UC Berkeley faculty member to hold an appointment at both our law school and our School of Public Health(opens in a new tab), including the Joint Medical Program(opens in a new tab) with UC San Francisco. As a sociologist of law and medicine, Obasogie’s research combines doctrinal scholarship with empirical methods and novel theoretical approaches to understand the ways race is central to how the institutions of law and medicine operate.

He’s the author of Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind and co-editor of Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics, and his scholarship has been published in top law reviews as well as major medical and science journals. Obasogie is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022. 

Recently, he organized and wrote the opening essay for a major project published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Legacies of Eugenics...