6th Workshop of Knowing Vaccines Research Network

29 November 2024

Photo: Lesley Branagan

General observations

The Knowing Vaccines Innovative Training Network workshop on 29 November 2024 served as a platform for interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration among scholars and PhD researchers in the Knowing Vaccines project. The workshop allowed PhD students to meet with the supervising professors to discuss their dissertation projects and progress. The event combined academic presentations, an interactive activity, and discussions of written papers and chapters, with the discussion focussed on theoretical and methodological approaches to vaccine research. This collaborative and interdisciplinary format ensured constructive feedback and facilitated the alignment of individual research with the broader goals of the Knowing Vaccines initiative.

Papers and presentations

Lesley Branagan and Florian Helfer presented a co-authored paper titled Unfulfilled Promises: Examining Perceptions of Government Betrayal, Reciprocity, and Moral Obligations in COVID-19 Post-vaccine Syndrome Cases. Their work examined the sentiments of post-vaccine patients regarding the perceived government responses to post-vaccine health issues, with a focus on reciprocity and moral obligations to the governments. The paper highlighted how the struggle for legitimacy and health care for post-vaccine patients is framed in concepts of biocitizenship inflected with understandings of reciprocity and a distinct moral economy of the pandemic.

Nataliya Aluferova's presentation Redefining Trust: Doctors' Perspectives explored how doctors define trust when they themselves take on the role of patients, within the context of the Russian-speaking community in Germany. According to the research data, professional solidarity and equal interaction are important to them, helping to avoid the hierarchy typically present in doctor-patient relationships. Many doctors actively leverage their social capital by choosing close friends as their treating physicians and by self-prescribing medications. These practices create a gap between their experiences and the reality of "ordinary patients”.

Peter Banks presented a paper titled Eradicating Fear: The GDR’s Polio Vaccination Campaign. Focusing on vaccination spaces, the paper traced the origins of mother advice centres in Germany and their use in the GDR, using 1950s photographs of Leipzig centres. Utilising an interdisciplinary approach to apply conceptions of spatiality and propaganda, the paper highlighted how these health facilities were instrumentalised towards propagating positive notions of the GDR state. However, the photographs also reveal continuities between the Nazi regime and the GDR.

As a theoretical excursion, Carolin Albers crafted a group activity New Materialism: Brainstorming Possible Applications, in which participants considered a short video review of

Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matters. This input on New Materialism served as a basis to consider the students’ PhD projects from Bennett’s theoretical angle in a joint discussion with the professors. This exchange aimed to contribute to Carolin’s project that explores different approaches towards knowledge production between soma and psyche in the post-pandemic context.

The 6th Workshop of Knowing Vaccines Research Network took place in Winter semester 2024 in Room 220 ESA W

Attendees were: (all internal)
Prof Ulf Schmidt, Prof Otto Habeck, Prof Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Dr Lesley Branagan, Dr Carolin Albers, Peter Banks, Nataliya Aluferova, Florian Helfer
Apologies: Prof Gertraud Koch; Tobias Becker (currently doing a Fulbright in USA).