March 2023 Newsletter

Posted by C3W Admin on March 31 2023

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 MARCH 2023

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Credit: The “Lady Dale”, a laboratory ship on the River Gambia. Colour photograph. Wellcome Collection.

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

This edition has

News
Publications
Upcoming events

NEWS

Congratulations

Sarah Howard has been accepted into the Grant Factory 2023 programme at Birkbeck, where she will develop her proposal for a historical-ethnographic project on childcare in Ethiopia.

Edna Suárez-Díaz has been invited for a short research stay from June 19 to 30th at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, at Lara Keuck’s working group.

Events

Sarah Marks comments on objects from the history of science and medicine in Series 2 of Strangest Things, airing on Sky History/Now TV (UK) and The Science Channel (US), a documentary series drawing from history, archaeology and science. The series airs between January and March 2023.

Postdoc Lu Chen is involved in organizing the Wellcome Centre’s seminar series for the 2022-2023 academic year.The series was composed of 5 independent seminars:

Trauma, justice and the human condition, the recording is available on the YouTube channel

“Health of People, Health of the Planet: A Diversity of Perspectives“, the recording is available on the Wellcome centre’s YouTube channel

Climate Change & Mental Health: Exploring Responses Across Cultures, you can view this on YouTube

Death by welfare, the recording is available on YouTube

Transcending Boundaries: Exploring the Intersection of Faith & Health. The recording is available on YouTube

ECR Research Cafe (23 March) organised by the ecr_network@thebritishacademy.ac.uk
Andrea Espinoza-Carvajal is Presenting: An alternative form of control. Moral governance and women’s bodies since Ecuador’s return to democracy in 1979 (Working title)

Dates for your Diary

University of Exeter Centre for Medical History
Writing the History of Abortion after the Overturning of Roe v. Wade
Workshop: Tuesday 18^th April 2023
Queen’s Building, University of ExeterSpeakers include: Mary Fissell (John Hopkins); Laurence Totelin and Rhian Williams (Cardiff); Andrea Espinoza-Carvajal (Exeter); Zubin Mistry (Edinburgh)On 24 June 2022 the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, striking down the constitutional protections for abortion care that had been established in 1973 and confirmed almost twenty years later by the ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization constituted a historical moment in itself, and the majority opinion also claimed to be correcting ‘Roe’s faulty historical analysis’. The history of abortion was part of the arguments, and it has been rewritten by the US Supreme Court on multiple levels.
But the story of abortion in past societies is much more diverse and complex than the opinion in Dobbs allows, and this workshop will explore that variation, the range of factors which have shaped and continue to shape both its experience and its telling. Mary Fissell, J. Mario Molina Professor in the History of Medicine at John Hopkins University, will get the discussion going, talking about her draft bookLong Before Roe, an immediate riposte to the US Supreme Court’s historical analysis, and other speakers will cover key episodes and projects in the ancient, medieval and modern worlds of contested reproductive rights. There will be an opportunity for wider reflections on the intersections between history, politics, law and women’s bodies.Further details will follow shortly. If you have any questions please contact the organisers: Kate Fisher and Rebecca Flemming.

Sarah Howard is co-organising a half-day event called Paid to Care: understanding remunerated childcare in the past, present and future on 26 April, at Birkbeck and online. The full programme will be available in the first week of April – please contact Sarah for more information.

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

16 May 14:00-15:30
Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa at the Crossroads
Abena Dove Osseo-Assare (University of Texas at Austin, USA)

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 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

Media

The latest from Twitter follow us @C3Worlds

Publications

‘Whose Public, Whose Goods? Generations of patients and visions of fairness in Ghanaian health’ an article by David Bannister has been published in the Social Science & Medicine volume 319

ABSTRACT

Since Ghana’s independence in 1957, the country has seen an ebb and flow of reforms intended to expand and fund state healthcare, informed by diverse notions of affordability and adequate provision. Cycles of attempted health reforms have emerged from disparate political and economic ideologies, themselves a product of broader global histories and specific national experiences. Based on group interviews with people across most administrative regions of Ghana, this paper examines how the formative historical experiences of different generations gives rise to a multiplicity of understandings of what constitutes a ‘fair’ distribution of national health resources. It discusses the forms and contents of arguments that people of different ages raised in both rural and urban settings in the course of the study – with particular reference to the operation of Ghana’s current National Health Insurance Scheme, and in light of their perceptions of the justice or injustice of present day healthcare in relation to earlier periods.

Research

Sarah Howard returned from a month-long research trip to Ethiopia in early March, where she worked in the archives of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, the Centre français des études éthiopiennes (CFEE), and the National Archives, and interviewed health professionals who were trained in socialist countries.