Highlights from the Knowing Vaccines July 2025 WorkshopKnowing Vaccines ITN Workshop

4 July 2025

Photo: Florian Helfer

In the first week of July, a regular Workshop of the Knowing Vaccines project took place, attended by the professors and students. The workshop featured presentations, group discussions, and reflections on dissertation excerpts shared in advance.

The meeting opened with Nataliya Aluferova’s text exploring the possibilities and limitations of analysing home medicine collections and related practices through John Law’s concept of ontological instability. The workshop discussion explored how Susan Leigh Star’s boundary object theory could enrich this perspective.

Tobias Becker’s paper addressed the conceptual aim of bringing together Foucauldian dispositif theory with an iconographic-iconological approach in order to analyse visual discourses on vaccination and their respective historicity. The discussion  then focused on its global dimensions and further inspirations from McLuhan’s media theory and Bolter and Grusin’s remediation.

Peter Banks presented a paper on polio healthcare in the GDR, focusing on the specialised rehabilitation centre at the thermal spa Thermalbad Wiesenbad in Saxony’s Erzgebirge region. While state propaganda promoted the centre as a site of prestige, the paper highlighted how, at a local level, it was also shaped by alternative spatial narratives around disability and the overall aims of rehabilitation.

Carolin Albers shared a piece of writing from her thesis on Covid-related fatigue, exploring how mind–body negotiations emerge in diagnostic processes. In the workshop, the discussion focused on how Carolin's theoretical approach could be fruitfully applied to her material and what changes could be made to benefit the overall argument.

Lesley Branagan presented a Special Issue proposal submitted to Medical Anthropology journal, titled Vaccine Experiences: An ethnographic reframing of the politics, morality and epistemologies of Covid-19 vaccination, co-authored with UK colleagues and including papers by three Knowing Vaccines members.

Florian Helfer’s presentation on affective morality examined emotional practices and moral logics in vaccination debates. Drawing on affect theory and Monique Scheer’s view of emotions as cultural practice, he analysed how emotions shape moral judgment, especially in discourses around PostVac experiences.

The Workshop concluded reflecting both the individual progress of each project and the growing coherence of the collective research agenda within the Knowing Vaccines Network. All participants noted significant progress in the project’s development, particularly the shift from data analysis toward identifying and resolving analytical tensions in applying conceptual frameworks to empirical material.

Written by Nataliya Aluferova

Participants

PhD candidates
Peter Banks
Carolin Albers
Tobias Becker
Florian Helfer
Nataliya Aluferova

Postdoctoral Researcher
Lesley Branagan

Professors
Gertraud Koch
Otto Habeck
Kathrin Fahlenbrach