April Newsletter

Posted by C3W Admin on April 29 2025

We have gathered together the latest news and events, together with some content not available on the website and put it into a Newsletter, see below.

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NEWSLETTER APRIL 2025

Welcome to this month’s newsletter.

We’re lucky to be basking in some lovely sunshine here, and it really does feel like spring has arrived!

Our project team has been busy with writing and field research, and we’re looking forward to sharing some fascinating blogs and updates with you soon.

In the meantime, why not take a moment to check out the news, publications, and events we’ve got listed below? And remember to sign up before it’s too late—don’t miss out!

NEWS

Sarah Howard has now joined the University of Bristol, as a Senior Researcher on the project ‘Welfare Citizenship and Intersectional Feminism in Britain, 1940-2000’, led by Saima Nasar. However, happily she will be staying with Connecting 3 Worlds one day a week until the end of September 2025.

https://wcif.blogs.bristol.ac.uk

Upcoming Events

On May 2, Dora Vargha will present a paper titled “At the intersection of the biomedical and social: vaccination and competing definitions of socialist health” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) in Boston, USA.

Sarah Howard is co-organising, with Julia Laite and Becka Hudson, a roundtable event on parenting in academia to be held at Birkbeck on Tuesday 13 May. This informal event will discuss some of the challenges and potential solutions to managing the demands of parenthood and the expectations and work rhythms of academic life. Sarah will discuss the campaign to redress the exclusion of PhD parents from childcare support available to other low-income parents, while other academics from different career stages will talk about their experiences and examples of good (and less good) practice. Parents and non-parents in academia are welcome; please contact Sarah for more information if you might be interested in attending: sarah.howard@bbk.ac.uk

https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/The-lives-of-early-career-researchers.pdf

Dora Vargha will present “Medics on the Move: Hungarian physicians, global solidarity projects and the limits of brotherhood” at the Diasporic Natures Conference held at Cambridge University 21-22 May, 2025

Sarah Howard will be attending the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) 2025 in Prague, where she will present a paper entitled ‘Childcare as healthcare in Ethiopia and Eastern Europe’ in the panel ‘Medical Socialist Entanglements: Health Connections between Eastern Europe and Africa in the Global Cold War’, organised by Alila Brossard Antonielli and Jelena Đureinović.

https://www.ecasconference.org/2025/

Presentations by the Project Team

Conference: Psychiatry, Racialisation, and Incarceration

On 3rd and 4th of April Sarah Marks hosted a conference on Psychiatry, Racialisation and Incarceration at Birkbeck, University of London. The conference included papers on colonial and postcolonial contexts, with geographies spanning Chile, East Germany, Italy, Lebanon, and India. A key cross-cutting theme included the emergence of Marxist-orientated critiques and reforms of psychiatric and criminal justice practices, from the 1960s through to the present. The conference will form the basis of an edited book.

As part of the conference, Nana Osei Quarshie also delivered a wide-ranging public lecture on the history of psychiatric practices in Ghana, from slavery to the present, linked with his forthcoming book African Pharmakon.

https://anthropology.yale.edu/profile/nana-osei-quarshie
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo255391317.html

Publications

Look out for the edited volume Medicine on a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine, which will be published in May 2025. The book, edited by Anne Kveim Lie, Jeremy Greene and Warwick Anderson features chapters by multiple Connecting Three Worlds members.

In a world of growing health inequity and ecological injustice, how do we revitalize medicine and public health to tackle new problems? This groundbreaking collection draws together case studies of social medicine in the Global South, radically shifting our understanding of social science in healthcare. Looking beyond a narrative originating in nineteenth-century Europe, a team of expert contributors explores a far broader set of roots and branches, with nodes in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia. This plural approach reframes and decolonizes the study of social medicine, highlighting connections to social justice and health equity, social science and state formation, bottom-up community initiatives, grassroots movements, and an array of revolutionary sensibilities. As a truly global history, this book offers a more usable past to imagine a new politics of social medicine for medical professionals and healthcare workers worldwide. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Chapter 5 Dora Vargha – Social and socialist: Ideas of health, medicine and society across the Iron Curtain
Chapter 8 Sebastian Fonseca – A ‘counter-hegemonic’ social medicine: leftist physicians during the Latin American Cold War
Chapter 13 David Bannister – Social Medicine Beyond Colonial Rule: The Medical Field Units of Ghana, 1930–2000

Project Research

Sarah Marks recently returned from a research trip to the Archives of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, where she consulted papers related to the Academy’s research on mental health and the development of international networks during the socialist period. The archivists at the Academy are especially supportive of international scholars conducting research with their collections, which span the whole range of science, technology and medicine.

https://archiv.sav.sk/en/scope.php

In mid-March Sarah Howard participated in an inter-country exchange workshop on school feeding and food systems in Kigali and Musanze, Rwanda, organised by the University of Rwanda and Imperial College London. Sarah’s contribution to the project focused on gender transformative methodologies in school food systems, drawing on her interest in histories of childcare and women’s organising developed through Connecting 3 Worlds.

https://cavm.ur.ac.rw/spip.php?article426