The Other Side of Eugenics: Socialist Experiments with Nurture over Nature
The 2026 Van Gelderen Lecture presented by Alexandra Noi

Wednesday, May 6th, 2026 at 5:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020
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The centuries-long nature vs. nurture debate culminated in the 19th century invention of eugenics – the understanding that human nature is biologically determined and people’s intellectual and physical abilities are fixed and cannot be improved through nurture. This flawed conceptualization taken up by both sciences and cultural milieu in the West found its horrendous application in the 20th century sterilizations of people of color and people with disabilities in the United States and physical elimination of the Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other marginalized communities by the Nazis in Germany. 

In the meantime, on the other side of the world, the socialist Soviet Union and China proposed an opposite approach that foregrounded nurture: they promoted the idea that human nature was plastic and malleable and that the environment was able to shape human beings, regardless of race, class, gender, and disability. 

Join the UCSB History Associates for this year's Van Geldren Lecture presented by PhD candidate, Alexandra Noi. Noi will tell the story of how people in the Soviet Union and China experienced – what may be called – an anti-eugenic approach: they lived through a political and scientific experiment of becoming “new people” through education, hygiene, and other aspects of social reform. The talk will argue that in their utopian pursuits the Soviet and Chinese social engineers turned the idea of “human plasticity” into the other side of the same eugenic coin – by incarcerating and exploiting citizens under the rhetoric of reforming people through labor.

Alexandra Noi is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her B.A. and M.A. in China Studies before completing a PhD in Modern Chinese Literature from St. Petersburg State University. At UCSB, she is pursuing her second PhD in Soviet and Chinese history. She is interested in exploring the historical connections between modern science and incarceration. Her research problematizes the analysis of authoritarianism and state violence by uncovering entanglements between their political ideologies and contemporary scientific ideas and practices.