September Newsletter

Posted by C3W Admin on September 19 2024

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 SEPTEMBER 2024

We are looking forward to this years HSS meeting taking place in Merida.

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

This edition has

Dates for your diary
Publications
Presentations by the team

I’ve been made aware that the links in the newsletter are on a timer which makes them useless after a while, so I have added the text for the link below the article, so you can still find out more.

News

Sarah Howard was selected to attend a British Academy writing retreat, held in Birmingham’s beautiful Botanical Gardens in early September. The two-day workshop was extremely productive, as around twenty scholars from a variety of disciplines worked together in total concentration.

Dates for your Diary

Dora Vargha will be in Budapest in early October for two events. She will give a keynote address titled Socialist health at the intersection of the social and biomedical at the conference ‘Post-War Bodies, Cold War Policies’ on October 3, held at Central European University (CEU).

The same evening, Dora will be delivering a public lecture in Hungarian language titled Beyond Bare Life – repression and care in international health, as part of the project ‘Beyond Bare Life’, organised by artists and curators Eszter Lázár and Edina Nagy, held at the ISBN+. https://www.isbnbooks.hu/

On October 18, Dora Vargha will present the paper ‘Hawkeye in North Korea: everyday life in a communist field hospital in the Korean War’ in the seminar ‘La matière du politique’ at Sciences Po, Paris.

HSS Annual MeetingGisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz have been busy with the preparation for the History of Science Society Centennial in Mérida, Yucatán. They are in charge of local arrangements for this important academic event when the oldest history of science academic society will turn 100 hundred years old. Also, it is the first time that HSS has taken place in a Latin American country.

Our C3W project members will participate in several roundtables, talks, and other activities. The preliminary program has been announced, and this will be a thrilling event:

https://hssonline.org/page/HSS24

Presentations by the Project Team

Sarah Howard travelled to Manchester Metropolitan University in early July, for the final day of ‘Take Your Research Public’ which had been taking place throughout June. After a fantastic month of learning from experts on trade books, the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), magazines, podcasts and social media, participants shared their own pitches for public-facing historical research. Watch this space for incoming books, articles and podcasts on such diverse topics as underground priests in Ukraine, Muhammad Ali’s travels in Britain, deaf WWI veterans, the Manchester cotton famine, 1928 – the year of literary sex, rioting apprentices on Tower Hill, and – from Sarah – the global history of the kindergarten!

While in Manchester for the public history event (see above), Sarah Howard visited the archives of the Working Class Movement Library, to look at histories of socialist childcare. WCML is a remarkable institution housing materials on working people’s campaigning and organising, which started as the personal collection of socialist and labour activist bibliophiles Ruth and Edmund Frow, housed in a Victorian building gifted by Salford Council in the 1980s. Sarah has also visited another wonderful archive, the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, to look at material on the links between the Black women’s movement in the UK, and revolutionary and pan-African groups in Ethiopia and the Ethiopian diaspora.

Group photograph of participants at the Globalizing Schizophrenia workshop, Berlin June 2024On 13th-14th June Sarah Marks attended the workshop ‘Globalizing Schizophrenia: The History and Legacy of the WHO Studies on Schizophrenia‘ at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she commented on papers linking to the roots of the Global Mental Health movement and transcultural psychiatry. She was also lucky enough to meet Yugoslav psychiatrist Norman Sartorious who was a key figure in the WHO studies, and who worked closely with Czechoslovak mental health professionals during the socialist period.

[https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/globalizing-schizophrenia-history-and-legacy-who-studies-schizophrenia]

Publications

Andrea Espinoza Carvajal and Sebastian Fonseca are currently editors for a Special Issue “Global Histories of Community Health” for the journal Bulletin of the History of Medicine. They have been working very hard with contributors to have articles submitted in time for the September deadline.

As editors, they have provided comments and have reviewed contributions internally for this final admission, getting things ready to the best quality possible for the external review process. We expect the Special Issue to be out by April next year, as agreed with journal editors.

Research news

Sarah Marks has been working with the Wellcome Mental Health Strategy Team and lived experience experts to chart the history of ideas about the causes of mental ill-health, and how these link with contemporary debates about research and funding. Along with artist Sasha Bergstrom-Katz, web-developer Gal Cohen and researchers Sarah Chaney and Rebecca Wynter she has developed an interactive online timeline http://historyofcauses.co.uk This is an ongoing project which is seeking to include more international content, especially from non-western contexts. If you have suggestions for themes or events please fill in the suggestion box to shape the team’s research priorities. You can read more about the project in this article from the Wellcome Trust: https://wellcome.org/news/lessons-tracing-200-years-perceived-causes-mental-health-challenges?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=o-wellcome

Sebastian Fonseca has just returned from a short fieldtrip to Colombia that was completed through the ERA Engagement Grant, from the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, at the University of Exeter.

While in Colombia, he contacted and agreed on future interviews with leaders and the rural community of Sumapaz moor in Colombia, a region historically known as the “passage way” for the guerrilla organization FARC throughout the Cold War in Latin America. The objective is to document an oral history repository of rural life and development during the times of social upheaval in search of the relationship between everyday health affairs and rural socialist development on the ground. The recollection of data will resume next year.

Additionally, he presented advancements of the work at the Global Health Symposium in Bogota, as part of the Department of Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.

Sarah Marks is currently in Prague to access primary sources at the National Library of the Czech Republic, particularly around Czechoslovak/Soviet/Chinese connections, where she has found new documents about the institutionalization of acupuncture and ‘Chinese People’s Medicine’ in Czechoslovakia across fields as wide as neurology, sport science and military medicine. She has also been furthering her research on East European-African encounters in the field of mental health, including documents detailing the everyday life of Plzeň psychiatrist Ivan Pišl during his time working at the psychiatric hospital in Addis Ababa in the 1960s. This material will feature in her paper for the History of Science Society Conference in Mérida in November.

Media

Dora Vargha has been interviewed about her research on vaccination and polio for a podcast series commissioned by UNICEF. The series provides an overview of the last 50 years of global immunisation campaigns.