This paper examines the central role of relationality in the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) at University College London (Knowler & Wright, 2025), where relational pedagogies emerged not as optional enhancements but as methodological and ethical imperatives. Because eugenics functioned through distanced modes of knowing, classification, statistical abstraction, and claims to neutrality that authorised harm while disavowing responsibility (Bhimani & Knowler, 2026), teaching its legacies exposes a core tension in contemporary higher education: can institutions address historical and ongoing injustice through information alone, or does meaningful repair require re‑working relationships between educators, students, and the histories universities continue to inhabit? Drawing on practice‑led case studies from ELEP, the paper shows how relationality materialised through students’ encounters with discomfort, resistance, and uncertainty (Altunbas, 2025). Institutional strategies that rely on naming or acknowledging eugenics, through lectures, archival access, or official statements, proved insufficient for fostering ethical engagement. What mattered instead was the relational infrastructure through which students met this knowledge: how vulnerability was held, whose experiences were centred, and how responsibility was shared rather than individualised. In this context, possibilities for repair depended on cultivating trust, dialogic openness, and collaborative meaning‑making while resisting forms of closure that function as institutional self‑absolution. The paper also situates this work within broader national conditions in England, where discourses of inclusion and belonging sit uneasily alongside audit cultures, metric‑driven governance, and increasingly constrained teaching labour. Relational work especially when engaging with histories of racism, ableism, or colonial violence remains structurally unsupported and frequently dismissed as pastoral rather than epistemic. Anti‑eugenics education therefore illuminates the contradictions of a sector that rhetorically values relationship yet systemically undermines it. Finally, the paper places the ELEP within contemporary scholarship that signals an uneven but growing re/turn to relational paradigms across decolonial pedagogy, disability studies, feminist ethics of care, and Indigenous methodologies. At a moment when higher education is increasingly shaped by datafication and technological optimisation, this project argues that relationality constitutes a form of knowledge‑producing infrastructure. How we know the past, how we teach it, and how we act in the present are inseparable from how we stand in relation to those historically and presently harmed by university knowledge.

Altunbas, H. G., Guo, X., Liu, Y., Knowler, H., & Wright, T. (2025). Can education heal? Staff and students exploring reparative pedagogies in the context of institutional harms in higher education. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (35). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi35.1337 Bhimani, N., & Knowler, H. (2026). Eugenics, education and exclusion: Challenging the past to change the future. In E. J. Done & S. Tomlinson (Eds.), Challenging exclusionary pressures in education: How inclusion becomes exclusion. Palgrave Macmillan. Knowler, H., & Wright, T. (2025). ELEP end‑of‑project report. UCL Arena Centre for Teaching and Learning. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/sites/teaching_learning/files/elep_end_of_project_report_summer_2025.pdf