September Newsletter

Posted by C3W Admin on September 25 2025

We have gathered together the latest news and events, and put it into a Newsletter, see below.

If you would like to receive our Newsletters in your mailbox each month, please sign up below. We promise to only send you news from the project.

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

NEWSLETTER SEPTEMBER 2025

Welcome to this month’s newsletter.

Our team has been busy with the EAHMH biannual meeting in August, followed quickly by the Final Conference for Connecting 3 Worlds, more details below.

This month is jam packed with news. Feel free to share with your friends and colleagues!

Tell them to sign up using the subscribe button on our website to receive future issues straight to their inbox.

https://connecting3worlds.org/

A message from the Project Leads

These past five years we discovered new histories and connections, explored
a wide range of methodologies and helped create a new academic field and community.

Thank you for joining us on this journey.

Sarah Marks, Edna Suárez-Díaz and Dóra Vargha

You can read more about the event on our website blog here

https://connecting3worlds.org/connecting-three-worlds-project-celebrates-four-years-of-global-collaboration/

News

Congratulations

We can share the good news that Sebastian Fonseca has been hired as a postdoctoral fellow in the Wellcome-Trust funded project “After the End” at Oxford University. He will be working with Professor Patricia Kingori, Dora Vargha, and others. More information on their website here

https://www.ethox.ox.ac.uk/Our-research/major-programmes/after-the-end

Dora will be assisting the European Research Executive Agency as Vice-Chair for the evaluation of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action this autumn.

In collaboration with Lukas Engelmann (University of Edinburgh), Dora is co-organizing a workshop titled ’Socialist epidemiology? The Political Legacy of a Science for Public Health at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, to be held October 13-16, 2025. See the description of the workshop here

https://fondation-brocher.ch/event/a-socialist-epidemiology-the-political-legacy-of-a-science-for-public-health-2/

Upcoming Events

Dora will be presenting her research at the conference “Spaces of Opportunities” held between 8-10 October at the University of Freiburg, organized by Martin Bemmann and Bogdan Iacob.

19-20th November, Warsaw

Sarah Howard, Simon Huxtable and Sarah Marks will be presenting their research at an upcoming conference at the University of Warsaw’s Faculty of History on ‘Theoretical and Practical Aspects of East European Development Aid to Africa During the Cold War Period’ on the 19th and 20th of November. The conference will focus on how development was conceptualized, questions of knowledge flow between and across Eastern Europe and Africa, the political rationale for development aid, and the planning and organization of expertise.

Past Events

Thank You

The EAHMH25 Berlin conference closed on August 29 with success. We would like to thank everyone who participated and helped make this conference a fantastic experience. At the General Assembly held in Berlin, the Scientific Board of the Association elected Katerina Liskova as the new President of the Association, Dora will continue to serve on the Board as Past President.

Workshop

Between September 15-18, Dora was leading an online authors’ workshop together with co-editor Guillaume Lachenal for the Cambridge History of Medicine Volume 6. Contributors discussed abstracts and writing strategies for developing chapters for the volume.

Publication News

Sebastian Fonseca had an article accepted in the Journal of Contemporary History titled ‘The Body Politic: Leftist humanitarianism in Latin American social medicine.’ It’s part of a Special Issue in Leftist Humanitarianism edited by Dr Siobhan Hearne (University of Manchester).

Abstract: This article explores the transnational network of Latin American Social Medicine, represented by the Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES), as a distinctive form of leftist humanitarianism developed during the Cold War. Amid fierce state-sponsored campaigns of anti-communist terror aimed at leftist ‘epistemicide,’ this intellectual community was targeted for its critical, politically active stance on health. The article argues that the very effort to destroy the network paradoxically spurred its transformation into a resilient South-South solidarity movement. Drawing on oral histories and archival research, it distinguishes ALAMES’s humanitarianism from both traditional, impartial aid and the post-1970s ‘new humanitarianism’ based on liberal human rights discourse and NGO frameworks. While other solidarity movements employed legalistic strategies, ALAMES’s humanitarian approach concentrated on creating and maintaining a critical epistemology rooted in historical materialism. It functioned by protecting persecuted practitioners, establishing institutional safe havens in Mexico and Brazil, and circulating clandestine texts (the ‘Libro Gris’). This history presents a decolonial counter-narrative to Euro-American-centric accounts of aid, demonstrating how solidarity founded on a shared struggle dissolved the donor-recipient binary to generate a powerful critique of modern technocratic global health models. It offers a model for epistemic survival in contemporary conflicts where knowledge producers are deliberately targeted.

Update

On the Community Health special issue that Andrea Espinoza and Sebastian Fonseca are co-editing, we can confirm that contributors have received feedback from reviewers and are currently making corresponding changes. This also enables us to advance the introductory paper, which is also a work in progress.

Work in Progress

Edna and Sebastian are currently working on a chapter contribution for the C3W’s edited volume on the topic of ‘socialism in the interstice,’ focused on Latin America and presented in our London meeting at the beginning of September.

Sebastian is also advancing a journal publication with Dr Cristian Montenegro, lecturer at KCL’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, on the topic of decolonising global health and nuanced practices. Alongside Cristian, he is also delivering a Guest lecture on metric in Global Health for the Postgraduate module Critical Global Health.

Coming Soon

Sebastian Fonseca will publish a chapter contribution in the edited book ‘Mobilising Medicine’ (University of Manchester Press). The title of this piece is ‘Campesinado – the armed agrarian movement in Sumapaz, Colombia: a case of socialist health (1940s-1950s).’ Should be published next year

Abstract: This article examines the armed agrarian movement in Sumapaz, Colombia (1940s-1950s), as a case study in the social capital and collective action related to health. In a context of extreme rural conflict and lacking official health data, this study employs a socio-historical methodology, reinterpreting archival oral histories through a critical global health lens. It argues that the collective action of the Campesinado—a political subjectivity forged in the struggle for land and sovereignty—generated well-being independently of and in opposition to the state and the formal biomedical paradigm. Using the theoretical framework of social capital, the article traces the movement’s evolution from a liberal self-defence guerrilla fighting paramilitary terror to a cohesive political-military structure influenced by the Colombian Communist Party. The analysis shows how this social capital manifested in concrete survival strategies that were also health-promoting practices: establishing a parallel society in clandestine mountain camps (el monte), featuring collective food production, democratic assemblies, and sophisticated mutual support networks. This chapter challenges materialist definitions of health that prioritise access to services and medicines. Instead, it suggests that the intangible processes of building community sovereignty and political agency are the fundamental root causes of well-being. The case of Sumapaz offers a decolonial perspective to social epidemiology and the medical humanities by providing a qualitative analysis of the mechanisms through which collective action creates health amid political violence.