Series Overview
Pandemics and their attendant impact on the cultural and political fibre of societies have accompanied human civilisation since its earliest days. The Antoine Plague of 165 – 180 AD swept through the Roman empire claiming an estimated 5 million lives and may have spread into Han China around the same time. The Black Death of 1347 – 1351 claimed an estimated 30 – 50% (200 million) of Europe’s population and triggered huge cultural shifts and political unrest. The global HIV pandemic which began in the early 1980s is estimated to have killed between 25 and 35 million people and, absent a vaccine, continues to have a considerable impact on many countries.
Participants in this series will consider the following questions:
-
How have we understood ourselves in relation to these pandemics, not only as health emergencies, but as cultural and historical phenomena?
-
How have different pandemics challenged or solidified pre-existing social stratification and inequalities?
-
How have pre-existing or new discourses of sickness, disability, religion, and morality been mobilised during different pandemics and in the years that followed them?
-
To what extent have historical discourses on pandemics and infectious disease in general survived into our own time and to what effect?
-
In what ways do different societies ‘remember’ great pandemics?
Thursday 10th December | 15:00 – 17:00 | Online
3. American Horror Stories II: Otherness in Memories of Pandemics, Past and Present
Although the story of contagion is necessarily a story of connections between people, as Orhan Pamuk notes, “like evil itself, plague was always portrayed as something that had come from outside.” Smallpox was a key player in the European colonisation of the Americas and the genocidal obliteration of millions of indigenous peoples. The eighteenth-century notion that Black bodies were inherently different and deficient, either more susceptible or completely immune to diseases relative to white populations, survives in contemporary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The US’s long history of racism directed towards Asian and Asian-American populations has too been reignited during the current crisis, while Islamophobia still soaks red into the very fabric of the post-9/11 world.
In this webinar, we will consider:
-
Narratives of Otherness in the American imaginary of threat and contagion;
-
The relationship between literature and politics, and the role of the writer in a state of national emergency;
-
The impact of American protest-movement discourses across the world, from Black Lives Matter to QAnon.
By the end of the webinar, participants will be familiar with historical discourses on white supremacy in the US and will be invited to consider what lessons and consolations can be found in American narratives of Otherness.
This webinar will be delivered by Dr Maria-Irina Popescu, who holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Essex. Her thesis examined the portrayal of domestic terrorists in contemporary American novels. In November 2017, she co-curated a major postgraduate conference of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) entitled ‘We Hold These Truths to Be Self Evident: Post-Truth and American Myths.’
Friday 11th December | 15:00 – 17:00 | Online
4. The Social Lives of Epidemics: Anthropological Perspectives from the West African Ebola Outbreak
The webinar will consider what it means to understand epidemics as social and political phenomena, drawing on experiences from West Africa’s Ebola epidemic (2014-16).
The discussion will start with an introduction to the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic, building on the webinar lead’s own research during and after the outbreak in Sierra Leone
-
We will explore anthropological approaches to epidemics and the possibilities and challenges of integrating social perspectives in epidemiological and humanitarian operations during the West African outbreak
-
We will assess the role of communities in outbreak response paradigms, focusing in particular on ‘containment’ and ‘engagement’ paradigms and their implications for the lives of those affected by the disease
-
We will consider whether and how Ebola prepared countries like Sierra Leone for the COVID-19 pandemic
-
We will debate whether and how lessons from West Africa, and in particular a focus on the social life of an epidemic, could be utilised for making sense of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK and beyond.
This webinar will be delivered by Dr Luisa Enria, who holds a PhD in International Development from the University of Oxford and is currently an Assistant Professor at the London School of Tropical Medicine.