Fifth Workshop of the Knowing Vaccines Research NetworkCase Analyses and Topic Areas

31 May 2024

Photo: dpa

On May 31st, 2024, the Knowing Vaccines Research Group held its fifth workshop which was organised in a hybrid format. After the previous workshop had featured detailed presentations about the current state of the different research projects, this workshop addressed more specific case analyses and topic areas. This included discussions of short presentations as well as manuscript drafts that were circulated in advance among the workshop participants.

To open the workshop, Tobias Becker’s paper On the internationality of vaccination images highlighted transnational dimensions of the visual history of vaccination. By drawing on exemplary sources from Germany, France, Britain and the US, he argued that an adequate analysis of the visual practices connected to vaccine discourses must consider broad processes of transnational circulations, adaptations and iconographic influences.

The paper by Peter Banks, Photographic Agency and the Spatial Propagation of the East German Iron Lung, focused on the Leipzig Trade Fair during the 1950s. By examining photographs and architectural floor plan designs of the trade fair exhibitions by the state-owned medical technology company, VEB Medizintechnik, he demonstrated that the GDR’s iron lung was spatially presented in accordance with its political significance.

Nataliya Aluferova provided the draft paper And what do YOU have at home? An anthropology of Medicine Cabinets of Russian-speaking people in Germany, detailing a novel approach to medication elicitation interviews developed during her research, from which she analysed the resulting data. In the discussion, the workshop participants suggested to split the text into two separate articles, focusing individually on the methodology and data analysis.

Prior to the workshop, Carolin Albers had shared parts from her paper “It has nothing to do with science”: multiples of post-pandemic fatigue and vaccination in Germany, in which she examined multiple enactments of post vac syndrome and the political, cultural, and social context in which these enactments are embedded. During the workshop, the participants discussed this piece of writing in light of the different disciplines that they brought along.

The presentation by Florian Helfer and Lesley Branagan, Unfulfilled Promises: Examining Perceptions of Government Betrayal, Reciprocity and Moral Obligations in COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Cases, offered interpretations of their fieldwork findings in UK and Germany. The paper aimed to shed light on notions of moral culpability and the attribution of state-citizen responsibility within the unique biopolitical landscape of the Covid pandemic. Florian and Lesley presented two possible theoretical frameworks – biocitizenship; and moral theory. The workshop participants proposed an approach that foregrounds the framework of biopolitics/biocitizenship while also incorporating notions of morality, as well a consideration of the authors’ positionality in a complex field.

Overall, the workshop gave multifaceted insights into the different contexts, methodologies and theoretical approaches of the research projects. It also showed how interdisciplinary conversations about the relations between these rich case analyses and their respective topic areas can feed back into the individual works of the research network.