Background

Förskolebarn vaccineras mot polio. Svenska Dagbladet 1957, fotograf Herman Ronninger (1895-1976). Från Stockholmskällan.

Vaccines, their practices, and means of production, are a historically contested field in which different values, experiences, needs, risks, rights and demands from individuals, public authorities, industries and other institutions have recurrently both clashed and coincided in the joint production of the common good: the protection of whole populations from diseases. But what comes to count as good principles for valuing vaccine research, production and vaccination practices?

This workshop brings together researchers who conduct critical work on the diverging values in the world of vaccines and vaccination. Questions of interest for this meeting are: 

  • What comes to count as respectable grounds for producing vaccines and implementing, or resisting, vaccination programs?
  • Who comes to decide what is a legitimate risk, and what is an ethical practice of vaccination; how?
  • What is population health worth in terms of the instrumentalization of human and non-human bodies in the production and testing of vaccines?
  • How do people’s experiences of vaccines come to be taken into account, or silenced?
  • What values—ethical, economic, or others—are competing, interacting or being performed?
  • By which actors, grounded in which experiences and in which relations of power?
     

Photo credits

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Venue and Registration

Venue

The Rausing Room, Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, English Park Campus - Centre for the Humanities, Building 6 (visiting address: Thunbergsvägen 3 P)

Registration

The workshop is full. Particicpants are welcome to register on November 23 at 09.00 at the venue.

Building 6 at the Centre for the Humanities, English Park Campus.
Building 6 at the Centre for the Humanities, English Park Campus.

(Call for Papers)

We welcome participants who wish to present work on the conflicted values and ethics of vaccine production and vaccination. We welcome perspectives from history, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, science and technology studies, and other relevant critical fields. 

Abstracts for papers of 200-300 words should be submitted no later than June 9, 2017, to Morag Ramsey.

Please provide your full name, institutional affiliation, and contact details. The format of the workshop will not allow for more than c. 15 papers. We will evaluate the abstracts based on the originality of the research and the relevance to the theme of the workshop. By the end of June, applicants will be notified if their papers have been accepted or not. The conference language is English.

Registration, lunches, conference dinner and accommodation (two nights at the conference hotel) are free of charge for participants presenting papers. It will also be possible to obtain limited economic support for travel expenses. Please indicate in the application if such support is required for attendance and what level of support is needed.

If you would like to attend without a paper, the deadline for application is also June 9, 2017. For those interested, please indicate your reasons for wanting to take part in the workshop. Please note that only attendees who present a paper are eligible for economic support.


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