May 2023 Newsletter

Posted by C3W Admin on June 29 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 MAY 2023

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

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

This edition has

News
Publications
Upcoming events

NEWS

Congratulations
The Graduate Department of the Faculty of Nursing of the University of Antioquia, especially the Master’s in Collective Health academic program is pleased to invite Sebastian Fonseca to the session on May 13, to teach the topic:Broadening of the perspective on investigative approaches to health collective from the context of English social medicine and its dialogue with the Latin American collective health
to the students of the XIII cohort of said program.The University of Antioquia said that Sebastian’s valuable contributions and academic experience related to the topic and his contributions from different currents will be very important for our program.

Events the team have been involved in

Dora Vargha gave a paper on at the seminar series ‘A Europe of health: past and present’ at the University of Strasbourg on 17 April, 2023.

Connecting Three Worlds was represented by Andrea Espinoza Carvajal and Dora Vargha at the annual conference of the European Society for Social Science History in Göteborg, Sweden held on 12-15 April, 2023. Andrea gave a paper titled “Family, Sex, and Reproduction. Transnational Conversations between the Andes and the Socialist World” as part of the panel Family, Sex and Reproduction: Legacy of the Cold War, while Dora presented new research in her talk ‘Making Political and Medical Subjects: Treatment in the Hungarian Hospital in North Korea 1950-57’ and served as chair and commentator on the panel ‘Adapting Children to Socialist Societies: Experts at the Crossroad of State Ambition and Parental Care’.

On the 18 April Sarah Marks visited the University of Oslo where, along with David Bannister, she led a reading workshop at HELSAM Institute of Health and Society on ideologies in Global Health, and later presented a paper entitled ‘Nuancing “Global Mental Health”: A transnational approach to psychotherapy interventions in Ghana and Zimbabwe’ as part of UiO’s Global Health Unpacked seminar series.

In Vienna at the CENTRAL Workshop: Commodities, Trade, and Materiality in the Global Cold War, organised by The Research Centre for the History of Transformations (RECET), held on 19-20 April at the University of Vienna, Dora Vargha presented ‘Medical technologies as solidarity: Eastern European goods in an alternative international health’ and served as a discussant on the panel ‘Decolonisation’.

Kindergarten/ creche at Melka Oba Farmer’s Cooperative, Ethiopia.
Credit: Ann Leonard and Cassie Landers (eds.), Child Care: Meeting the Needs of Working Mothers and Their Children, 1990, p22.]

Sarah Howard and Sacha Hepburn organised a hybrid event on 26 April at Birkbeck called Paid to Care: understanding remunerated childcare in the past, present and future. There was a rich variety of papers and discussions on the topic of those paid to provide childcare, with an excellent range of time periods, locations, perspectives, disciplines and methodologies. Panels that looked at childcare in ‘home’ settings and in institutional settings were complemented by a roundtable panel that drew on the expertise of policy-makers and policy-engaged academics.

Sarah’s contribution to the event looked at co-operative childcare in Derg-era Ethiopia. In particular, she focused on the tensions between radical socialist and feminist visions of fully socialised domestic work and kindergartens as a site for improving public health. She drew on archival research in Addis Ababa and London as part of her ISSF Wellcome-Birkbeck Fellowship.

On 8 May Sarah Marks was invited to present to The Empty Pipeline project, which examines why antibiotic production has ‘run dry’, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The researchers were interested in the Connecting Three Worlds team’s experiences with oral history interviews and witness seminars, and to discuss the potential and limitations of these methods in the history of science and medicine.

Liang Wan attended the American Association of History of Medicine (AAHM) conference in Ann Arbor (Michigan) from 10-14 May, where he presented a paper titled “Military Origin and People’s Legacy: Relocating Acupuncture in the Nascent Socialist China 1945-1958”

On 12 May Dora Vargha gave a talk titled ’The end and what comes after: epidemic narratives and temporalities of disease from a historical perspective’ at the Science, Ethics and Politics Day 2023, organised by the International Max Planck Research School for Infectious Diseases and Immunology in Berlin.

On 17 May Sarah Marks will took part in a roundtable event at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research entitled ‘Social Research and the Public Good’ on the theme of anxiety and the contemporary cost of living crisis.

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

Dates for your Diary

Sarah Howard will present at the African Anthropology Seminar Series at the University of Oslo on May 24th, with the title: Stable Jobs, Precarious Lives: Rural Public Servants in Ethiopia

On 25 May Dora Vargha will be giving a keynote titled ‘Medical humanities, health policy, and avenues for collaboration’ at the Medical Humanities PG-ECR Workshop held at Oxford University, organised by Medical Humanities University of Oxford; King’s College London; The Centre for British Studies (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin); Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

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

13 June 14:00-15:30
Forensic Diplomacy and International Technical Cooperation:
The Case of Mexico’s Extraordinary Mechanism for Forensic Identification
Vivette Garcia Deister (UNAM, Mexico)

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

For the latest from Twitter follow us @C3Worlds

Research

Dora Vargha visited the Hungarian National Archives in April, and has been conducting research at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin on international relations among socialist countries.

In April Sarah Marks travelled to Prague to continue her research on Czechoslovak-African relations at the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She has been working on sources about Ethiopian-Czech health exchange, to complement the research that Sarah Howard has been carrying out in Addis Ababa, including the building of hospitals and rural health centres, as well as training of Ethiopian professionals. She is also examining documents on the relationship with Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist Ghana between 1957 and 1966, when many Czechoslovak experts were involved in technical assistance and infrastructure building in the newly independent state. Ghanaian newspapers also featured enthusiastic coverage of Czechoslovak initiatives at home, including innovations in maternal and child healthcare – for example in this clipping from The Ghanaian Times in 1960, which was sent back to the Ministry in Prague by Czechoslovak diplomats at the embassy in Ghana

Sebastian Fonseca presented his work in Colombia at the Global Health Symposium, organised by the Medical School of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana PUJ on the 24 March. His presentation was titled “Rural Health and Social Conflict in Colombia: A Critical Study in Global Health”, and he shared the panel with Alona Kamenshchikova (STS at the University of Maastricht) and Alejandro Salicrup (NCI/NIH). The presentation mainly focused on the fieldwork and findings he has been advancing in Colombia, on the analysis of the FARC health models in Colombia during the 1960s and 1970s.

As a result of the presentation, he had very a very fruitful meeting with the Dean of the Medical School, towards future collaborations in a new Master’s in Global Health at the PUJ – the first of its kind in Latin America.