Knowing Vaccines participates in international conference

18 July 2024

Photo: Lesley Branagan

In July 2024, Hamburg University’s Knowing Vaccines ITN team members co-convened and participated in a panel at the EASST-4s Conference in Amsterdam, titled Beyond Polarisation: Approaches to Vaccines. https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easst-4s2024/p/14363.

Knowing Vaccines project manager Lesley Branagan co-convened the panel with UK-based colleagues Anna Dowrick (University of Oxford), Rebecca Cassidy (University of Kent), and
Simon Bailey (University of Kent).

The panel aimed to consider the interplay between the promises of vaccines, unexpected vaccine experiences, and Covid’s threat to rational order.

Two PhD students in the Knowing Vaccines project presented papers:

• Nataliya Aluferova presented Navigating the system: lifehacks of vaccine skeptics among the Russian-speaking community in Germany, which particularly focused on the efforts of individuals with Soviet or post-Soviet backgrounds to circumvent the country’s mandatory Covid-19 vaccination policy.
• Florian Helfer presented Moral vaccination? Ethical regimes in the biopolitics of Covid vaccinations in Germany. An ethnographic discourse analysis. Through the lens of moral anthropology, the paper examined the discursive structure of Covid vaccination and the implementation of ethical regimes in public health policy.

Amongst the other panellists, there were diverse approaches to thinking about vaccines. This included a consideration of the embodiment of biotechnology’s knowing/unknowing in clinical trials of the Covid vaccine (Jan Hinrichsen, University Medical Centre, Göttingen); reimagining vaccine hesitancy in Ireland (Dan Artus, UCL); the making of mistrust in health authorities during Singapore’s covid vaccination campaign (Shiwei Chen, Erasmus University Rotterdam); and the biopolitics of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the Philippines (Vincen Gregory Yu, University of Sydney).

Stay tuned for news about how we’re taking this exchange forward.