December Newsletter

Posted by C3W Admin on December 16 2022

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 DECEMBER 2022

Welcome to the December edition of our newsletter, where you will find the latest research findings, activities and events.

Thank you for your support this year and we look forward to sharing some exciting news next year, 2023 is going to be full of events, news and great research trips.

This edition has

Publications
Research trips
Upcoming events

NEWS

Congratulations

Sarah Marks was recently selected by the Wellcome Trust’s Mental Health Team to lead a 12-month project for them on ‘The History of Hypothesised Causal Mechanisms in Mental Health since 1900’, between January and December 2023. Sarah will work with researchers Rebecca Wynter and Sarah Chaney, and artist Sasha Bergstrom-Katz to produce a report, three research articles and a digital visual resource in collaboration with the Asylum Magazine, the Birmingham Institute for Mental Health and the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Events

On December 1, 2022, Dora Vargha gave an online talk at Shanghai University titled Socialist medicine: the history of global health from the socialist world’s perspective.

Panel at the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S)
Meeting in Puebla, Mexico December 7-10, 2022.

The Project team were able to participate with a panel. The panel’s title was:
The Cold War, Leftist Internationalism, and Health.
It included presentations of research advances by:
Lu Chen
Title: Alternative Knowledge Circulation: China, Leftist Internationalism and Learning Management of Health Statistics

Sebastian Fonseca
Title: Solidarity in Medical Education: Creating Latin American social medicine

Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz
Title: “Radioisotope itineraries and nuclear medicine between Socialist and Third World countries”

Andrea Espinoza
Title: Moral governance and women’s bodies from Left to Right, an unexpected alignment

The team took some photographs while they were there, looks like it was a great success and the feedback has been positive, well done.

Dates for your Diary

Postdoc Lu Chen is involved in organizing the Wellcome Centre’s seminar series for the 2022-2023 academic year.

The series is composed of 5 independent seminars, including:

Upcoming events

20th January, 2023

Death by welfare

China Mills

18th February, 2023

Religions and global health

Speakers:

Fabian Winiger

Benjamin Bronnert Walker

Erminia Colucci

Previous events

Trauma, justice and the human condition was held on 15th September, 2022, the recording is available on the YouTube channel

The first session “Health of People, Health of the Planet: A Diversity of Perspectives” was held at 20th October, the recording is available on the Wellcome centre’s YouTube channel

Climate Change & Mental Health: Exploring Responses Across Cultures was held on 17th November, you can view this on YouTube

On January 26-27, 2023, Exeter University will be hosting a two-day symposium on Healing disruption: other histories of intoxication and ‘addiction’. The event is part of Maziyar Ghiabi’s Wellcome Trust University Award Living ‘addiction’ in states of disruption: a transdisciplinary approach to drug consumption and recovery in the Middle East (2021-26). The symposium hosts researchers from across the global North and South and invites them to respond to the following question: What do the states (and concepts) of intoxication and ‘addiction’ look like within/without the Western world and its historical interactions of capitalism and empire? Participants will be asked to rethink and unthink drugs histories and politics in dialogue with epistemological, ontological, and cosmological approaches grounded in empirical inquiries into localised cultural environments and political times.

Science Diplomacy and Science in Times of War
Institute’s Colloquium 2022-23 of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Dora Vargha is organiser of this year’s Institute’s Colloquium at the MPIWG. The series is dedicated to the rethinking of science and scientific knowledge in times of peace and in times of crises and war. Within this framework, the colloquium series will interrogate the history and concepts of “science diplomacy,” its applicability across time and space; limits and opportunities of scientific cooperation across borders, cultural and national contexts, fluctuating between peace and war; legitimation of using science and scientists as means of sanctions and geopolitical tools; and if we should differentiate between politically and diplomatically usable science and politically/diplomatically irrelevant science, reminiscent of Nobel laureate Henry Dale’s distinction between peaceful “normal science” and “abnormal” war science?

The next event is 14th February 14:00-15:30

The Colloquium is held in a hybrid format and open to all, you can find the program and registration information for online and in-person participation here: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/colloquium/science-diplomacy

From Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children’s Literature 1920-35,
edited by Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya, 2013. Redstone Press.April 2023 – Sarah Howard has had a panel accepted at the Assocation of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference to be held at SOAS in April 2023. Co-organised with Birkbeck colleague Sacha Hepburn, the panel is called ‘Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on Paid Childcare’. The Call for Papers is now open, closing January 7th 2023 (click and scroll down).Abstract:Longstanding feminist debates about the undervaluing and exploitation of caring labour came into focus in 2020, as the Covid pandemic closed schools and workplaces across the globe, and placed the lowest paid care workers on the frontlines of harm. The renewal and amplification of interest in the politics, economics and social repercussions of care has moved beyond critique to alternative conceptions of how care needs to be centred and interdependence celebrated.This panel will focus in particular on the caring labour involved in looking after children, from the perspective of those providing the care. Looking at the recent and more distant past, we invite ethnographic and historical contributions that address the life-worlds, agency and well-being of those who care for children. We are particularly interested in how shifting forms of remunerated childcare – domestic and institutional; informal and professionalised; for cash or in-kind payments – enact or produce different norms, relations and reciprocities. For example, if workers become autonomous commercial providers of care, rather than being incorporated into households as junior dependents, what effect does this have on gendered, racialised and class-based hierarchies? Do different types of attachments, interests and subjectivities become possible in different child caring arrangements, and are others curtailed? In the spirit of the call for repair over critique, we are calling for papers that address future solutions and imagined alternatives, despite the challenges involved in formalising and organising this intimate form of work.

Media

Sarah Marks is currently working with BBC Radio 4 to inform a documentary series on psychiatry and mental health in the UK. The programmes are expected to be aired in the new year.

Publications

Sarah Howard has written a book review of Ethiopia in the Wake of Political Reforms, edited by Melaku Geboye Desta, Dereje Feyissa Dori, and Mamo Esmelealem Mihretu, for Aethiopica: International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies (2022). You will be able to read the review here:https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/aethiopica/index

Sarah Howard has had a paper accepted for a special edition of Social Anthropology on the theme of absurdity, and will take part in a review workshop organised by the University of Oslo in March 2023.

Andrea Espinoza Carvajal coauthored a chapter with Professor Jelke Boesten (King’s College London) in the book Women Resisting Violence. Voices and Experiences from Latin America as part of the Women Resisting Violence Collective. In Women Resisting Violence, case studies and interviews with women leaders from Latin America highlight the multiple and intersecting forms of gendered violence – where race, ethnicity, sexuality, and socio-economic status, and other markers combine to identify, discriminate against, and target women.Dora Vargha has contributed to the Pandemic and History conversation as part of the AHR Lab in the latest issue of the American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 1341–1378. Dora’s essay, titled ‘Where is the end and what comes after?’ reflecting on geographies and temporalities of pandemic history can be read alongside contributions from David Arnold, Pablo F. Gomez, Maria John, Angela Ki Che Leung, and Kuala Ngalamulume.

Writing retreats and Research Progress

Writing Retreat at Cholula, Puebla (December 4-6, 2022)

The C3W project funded a fruitful writing retreat in Cholula, Puebla. Five members of the team (Andrea Carvajal, Sebastián Fonseca, Lu Chen, Gisela Mateos, and Edna Suárez-Diaz) were joined by Gabriela Soto Laveaga (Harvard University and Advisory Board member), Vivette García Deister (UNAM, editor-in-chief of Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society), Lina Pinto-García (Universidad de los Andes and InSIS, U. of Oxford), and Joel Vargas (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico), to work on the publication of a special issue on community health. On the last day, Emily Vazquez (U. of Illinois and managing editor at Global Public health) joined to discuss publication options.

Besides enjoying the traditions of Cholula, the team had time to work on other ongoing projects, including the mapping of the translational and multilayered collaborations characteristic of socialist health and medicine; and a discussion of historiographic categories useful for the larger project. More on these activities will be published on our C3W webpage.