Body Knowledge Conference Programme
Body Knowledge: Medicine and the Humanities in Conversation |2-4 September 2013
Hosted by WiSER at the Wits School of Public Health | Convened by Catherine Burns and Ashlee Masterson
Monday 2 September
Registration: 8.00-8.30 (Wits School of Public Health)
Plenary (8:30-10:00) Conference Room
8:30-8:40
8:40-9:00 |
Welcome
Introduction |
Ruksana Osman (Dean of Humanities, Wits) Sharon Fonn (Acting Dean of Health Sciences, Wits) Ashlee Masterson (Wits) |
9:00-10:00 |
Keynote Address: ‘Figuring the tumour: photography, self, and cancer’ |
Julie Livingston (Rutgers) |
10:00-10:30 Tea and Coffee
Panel 1: Medicine and Race (10:30-12:15) Chair: Belinda Bozzoli Venue A
10:30-10:50 |
‘I am a woman of colour’ |
Raimi Gbadamosi (Wits) |
10:50-11:10 |
‘The melancholy of servitude: New Spain’s melancholic Blacks and phlegmatic Indians’ |
Heather Peterson (U South Carolina Aiken) |
11:10-11:30 |
‘From “dark” country to “dark” continent: AIDS, “race”, and medical research in the South African Medical Journal, 1980-1995’ |
Carla Tsampiras (Rhodes) |
11:30-12:00 |
Questions and discussion |
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Panel 2: Medicine and Power 1 (10:30-12:15) Chair: Prinisha Badassy Conference Room
10:30-10:50 |
‘Dark continent, dark remedy? A half century of (non) histories of thalidomide research in Africa |
Julie Parle (UKZN) |
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10:50-11:10 |
‘“Vaccinated at gunpoint”: human rights, competing ethical imperatives, and democratic anxieties in Malawi’s health sector’ |
Anna West (Stanford) |
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11:10-11:30 |
‘Seeing a blinded eye: health, policing and state craft in South Africa’ |
Oliver Human (U Amsterdam) |
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11:30-11:50 |
‘Viruses and antigens: transplants, pests and parasites: modernity and the medicalization of the political’ |
Sue van Zyl (Wits) |
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11:50-12:15 |
Questions and discussion |
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12:15-13:00 Lunch
Panel 3: Medical Multiplicity 1 (13:00-14:25 ) Chair: Nicky Falkof Conference Room
13:00-13:20 |
‘Speaking back to biomedicine in the genomic age’ |
Zimitri Erasmus (Wits); Kezia Lewins (Wits) |
13:20-13:40 |
‘Uncertain medical intersections: spirit healing, biomedicine and the shadow of the state at the time of the 2009 elections in Nampula city, northern Mozambique’ |
Daria Trentini (SOAS) |
13:40-14:00 |
‘Of miracles and dreaming: a case study of crooked resistance to dominant paradigms of morality and wellness in 1960’s South Africa’ |
Dominique Santos (Goldsmiths) |
14:00-14:25 |
Questions and discussion |
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Panel 4: Body Practices and Strategies (13:00-14.25) Chair: Patrice Repar Venue A
13.00-13.20 |
‘Beadwork and embodiment’ |
Anitra Nettleton (Wits) |
13.20-13.40 |
‘Steaming the devil away: migration and the reinvention of healing traditions in the city’ |
Lorena Nunez (Wits); Melekias Zulu (Wits); |
13.40-14.00 |
‘The body keeps the score: reflections on formative research regarding intimate partner violence during pregnancy and antenatal clinic visits’ |
Nataly Woollett (Wits) |
14.00-14.25 |
Questions and Discussion |
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Panel 5: The Social Life of Epidemics (14:30-16:10) Chair: Randall Bird Conference Room
14:30-14:50 |
‘The social epidemiology of silicosis: hiding an epidemic for a century’ |
Jaine Roberts (Rhodes) |
14:50-15:10 |
‘Beyond “mad and deviant”? The ethics and policy implications of researching adolescents living with HIV’ |
Mandisa Mbali (U Stellenbosch) |
15:10-15:30 |
‘Counting consequences: the politics of treatment access at an HIV support group in Pretoria’ |
Jimmy Pieterse (U Pretoria) |
15:30-15:50 |
‘“A house in Virginia”: diagnosis, acuity and chronicity in the age of the “maturing” HIV epidemic |
Christopher Colvin (UCT) |
15:50-16:10 |
Questions and discussion |
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Panel 6: Expressions of Suffering and Healing (14:30-16:10) Chair: Julie Parle Venue A
14:30-14:50 |
‘Illness and image’ |
Dawn Garisch (novelist and GP) |
14:50-15:10 |
‘Chronic Disease and the urban healthworld: A Sowetan case study’ |
Daniel Lopes Ibanez-Gonzalez (U Wits) |
15:10-15:30 |
‘Up close & personal: journeys of disease and resilience, an analysis of the narrative accounts of South African health care workers who have contracted TB’ |
Janet Giddy (Western Cape Department of Health) |
15:30-16:10 |
Questions and discussion |
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16:10-16:30 Tea and coffee
16:30-18:00 |
Plenary Roundtable: Humanities and Medical Pedagogies in Conversation Chair: Catherine Burns |
Stephen Tollman (Wits); Steve Reid (UCT); Laetitia Rispel (Wits); Claire Penn (Wits); Ruksana Osman (Wits); Susan Levine (UCT); Laurel Baldwin-Ragaven (Wits) |
18:10 Bus departs for Origins Centre
18:30-20:30 |
Colin Richards Exhibition and Exhibition Lecture, followed by cocktail party |
Exhibition discussion: Sarah Nuttall (Wits) and Penny Siopis (UCT) |
Tuesday 3 September
Panel 7: Medicine and Power 2 (8:30-10:00) Chair: Patrick Randolph-Quinney Venue A
8:30-8:50 |
‘“A nice extra job”: Muriel Horrell’s 1949 Report on the shortage of nurses in South Africa immediately after the Second World War’ |
Sue Krige (Wits) |
8:50-9:10 |
‘The “curable abnormal”, a perfect object for a discipline in construction: medico-pedagogical goals in turn of the twentieth century France’ |
Sabine Arnaud (Max Planck Inst., Berlin) |
9:10-9:30 |
‘Civilising (in)sanity: the photographs of Fort England Lunatic Asylum, Grahamstown, SA, circa 1890s’ |
Rory du Plessis (U Pretoria) |
9:30-10:00 |
Questions and discussion |
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Panel 8: Embodiment and the Self (8:30-10:00) Chair: Sarah Nuttall Conference Room
8:30-8:50 |
‘Narrative embodiment: “the substance of remembering” in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! |
Merle Williams (UCT) |
8:50-9:10 |
‘The body in sickness’ |
Tina Sideris (clinical psychologist) |
9:10-9:30 |
‘The neuroplastic human: ethics, subjectivity, truth’ |
Annie Leatt (UCT) |
9:30-10.00 |
Questions and discussion |
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10:00-10:30 Tea and coffee
Panel 9: Medicine, Sex and Gender 1 (10:40-12:25) Chair: Annie Leatt Venue A
10:40-11:00 |
‘From venereal disease carriers to common prostitutes to sex workers: representations of women who sell sex in the medical literature in SA’ |
Marlise Richter (UCT) |
11:00-11:20 |
‘Victimizing the female body: reproductive culture(s), health policies and biomedicine in postcolonial India’ |
Nisha Tiwari (U Delhi) |
11:20-11:40 |
‘Art and homophobia in Johannesburg schools’ |
Jillian Carman (Wits) |
11:40-12:00 |
‘Historicizing the debates on male circumcision in South Africa’ |
Natasha Erlank (U Johannesburg) |
12:00-12:25 |
Questions and discussion |
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Panel 10: Bodies and the Body Politic 1 (10:40-12:25) Chair: Ashlee Masterson Conference Room
10:40-11:00 |
‘Fertility treatment and sterilization: not quite black and white’ |
Nina Worthe (U Pretoria) |
11:00-11:20 |
‘From Body Worlds to Body Farms: death, decay and reconstruction in the public domain’ |
Patrick Randolph-Quinney (Wits) |
11:20-11:40 |
‘The exhibited corpse: immortality and taboo in Body Worlds’ |
Nicky Falkof (Wits) |
11:40-12:00 |
‘Mulele’s dead body and the politics of death in postcolonial DR Congo’ |
Emery Kalema (Wits) |
12:00-12:25 |
Questions and discussion |
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12:30-13:15 Lunch OR Tour by Patrick Randolph-Quinney of Dart Collection, the Comparative Collection and the Hunterian Anatomical Museum
Panel 11: Representing the Body (13:20-15:05) Chair: Claire Penn Venue A
13:20-13:40 |
‘Unruly (con)texts: illness, occultation and estrangement in JM Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990) and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006) |
Sarah Pett (York) |
13:40-14:00 |
‘Dynamics of body, heroin and text in William Burroughs’s Junky’ |
Eva Kowalska (Wits) |
14:00-14:20 |
‘Bodies across of the Indian Ocean: memory, transnationalism and women’s space in the work of Lindsey Collen’ |
Anne Putter (U Johannesburg) |
14:20-14:40 |
‘Representations of Alzheimer disease in literature and film’ |
Monika Baar (U Groningen) |
14:40-15:05 |
Questions and discussion |
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Panel 12: The Social Life and Ethics of Medical Trials (13.20-15.05) Chair: Ahmes Dhai Venue B
13.20-13.40 |
‘There’s always hope even if I sacrifice’: Communicating the experience of participating in a clinical trial through song’ |
Jonathan Stadler (WRHI) |
13.40-14.00 |
‘Symbolic Violence, Structural Violence: Culture and Public Health Ethics’ |
Kirk Fiereck (Columbia) |
14.20-14.40 |
‘Experimental Communities: Mediating locality in clinical trial sites in South Africa’ |
Lindsey Reynolds (U Stellenbosch) |
14.40-15.05 |
Questions and discussion |
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Panel 13: Histories of Hospitals and Medical Training (13:20-15:05) Chair: Steve Reid Conference Room
13:20-13:50 |
‘Apartheid health care: A case study of Baragwanath Hospital’ |
Simonne Horwitz (U Saskatchewan) |
13:50-14:20 |
‘Writing the history of McCord Hospital’ |
Catherine Burns (Wits) and Julie Parle (UKZN) |
14:20-14:40 |
‘Writing the history of medical education in South Africa’ |
Vanessa Noble (UKZN) |
14:40-15:05 |
Questions and discussion |
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15:05-15:25 Tea and coffee
Roundtable Discussion (15:30-17:00) Chair: Nefisa Essop Sheik Conference Room
15:30-17:00 |
Plenary roundtable: The Politics of Treatment Access: Reverberations of the HIV epidemic |
Mark Heywood (Section27); Janet Giddy (Western Cape Department of Health); Francoise Venter (Wits); Debbie Glencross (Wits) |
Plenary Lecture: 17:15-18:45 Marie Curie Theatre
17:15-18:45 |
Plenary Lecture: ‘After “After Cardenio”’ |
Jane Taylor (Leeds) |
19.15 Adler Cabinet Exhibition and Conference Dinner: Adler Museum
Wednesday 4 September
Panel 14: Politics of Nourishment 1 (8:30-10:00) Chair: Sarah Duff Conference Room
8:30-8:50 |
‘“I am not a taste barbarian”: Germans’ experiences of taste and digestion in World War 1 from the molecular to the cultural’ |
Kristen Ann Ehrenberger (U Illinois) |
8:50-9:10 |
‘When malnutrition manifests as obesity in an urban Mozambican shantytown: embodying the food crisis and seeking healthcare for diet-related illnesses’ |
Serena Stein (Princeton) |
9:10-9:30 |
‘Nutritivity, plasticity, and population: ART scale up and the stabilisation of the gut’ |
Thomas Cousins (U Stellenbosch) |
9:30-10:00 |
Questions and discussion |
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Panel 15: Body Parts (8:30-10:00) Chair: Janet Giddy Venue A
8:30-8:50 |
‘’Body parts in history: scientific racism and the production of knowledge during the 1930s at the Volkekunde Dept of Stellenbosch University’ |
Handri Walters (U Stellenbosch) |
8:50-9:10 |
‘Hands, soap and development: politics at the Centre of Handwashing Behaviour Change Interventions in Developing Countries’ |
Janice Moodley (Wits) |
9:10-9:30 |
‘The surgeon’s hands: Christiaan Barnard’s arthritis handbook’ |
Ashlee Masterson (Wits) |
9:30-10:00 |
Questions and discussion |
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10:00-10:30 Tea and coffee
Panel 16: Politics of Nourishment 2 (10:30-12:15) Chair: Ashlee Masterson Conference Room
10:30-10:50 |
‘Rather dead than fat: constructions of the fat body as diseased’ |
Louise Vincent (Rhodes); Chantelle Malan (Rhodes) |
10:50-11:10 |
‘Programmed for vulnerability: structural violence and developmental programming in the production of obesity in South Africa’ |
Michelle Pentecost (Oxford) |
11:10-11:30 |
‘A history of breastfeeding’ |
Catherine Burns (Wits) |
11:30-11:50 |
‘Part-time medicine man: Gandhi’s health and medical practices’ |
Vashna Jagarnath (Rhodes) |
11:50-12:15 |
Questions and Discussion |
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Panel 17: Bodies and the Body Politic 2 (10:30-12:15) Chair: Dawn Garisch Venue A
10:30-10:50 |
‘The technologies of telling “good” medication from “bad” medication’ |
Julia Hornberger (Wits) |
10:50-11:10 |
‘Staying alive: moving beyond social category in analyzing women’s breast cancer experiences at a public healthcare facility in Johannesburg’ |
Renee van der Wiel (Wits) |
11:10-11:30 |
‘Caster Semenya and Oscar Pistorius: improper corporealities cripqueering the body politic’ |
Benita De Robillard (Wits) |
11:30-11:50 |
‘Drug abuse, medical discourse and the addict’s body (France, 1970s-1990s): illness as a metaphor?’ |
Alexandre Marchant (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan) |
11:50-12:15 |
Questions and Discussion |
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Panel 18: Medical Multiplicity 2 (10:30-12:15) Chair: Emery Kalema Venue B
10:30-10:50 |
‘“Lost for words”: cultural interpretations of aphasia’ |
Claire Penn (Wits) and Carol Legg (Wits) |
10:50-11:10 |
‘The conflictual medical plurality in Nigeria and the post-colonial integration of indigenous and orthodox healing systems’ |
Adebayo Lawal (Lagos) |
11:10-11:30 |
‘Teaching health science students to ‘be content with a body that refuses to hold still’ |
Helen Macdonald (UCT) and Susan Levine (UCT) |
11:30-11:50 |
‘“Maybe mine is bigger than yours” – the business and discourses of penis enlargement in central Johannesburg’ |
Thabisani Ndlovu and Maxwell Kadenge (Wits) |
11:50-12:15 |
Questions and discussion |
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12:30-13.25 Lunch
Panel 19: Medicine, Sex and Gender 2 (13:30-15:10) Chair: Julie Livingston Conference Room
13:30-13:50 |
‘Not by “the light of nature alone”: the infant welfare movement and mothercraft in South Africa during the early twentieth century’ |
Sarah Duff (U Wits) |
13:50-14:10 |
‘Abortion Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa’ |
Rebecca Hodes (UCT) |
14:10-14:30 |
‘Massage, jab and pop: negotiating the female body through body enhancement products – perceptions of sellers and the public in central Johannesburg’ |
Thabisani Ndlovu (Wits) |
14:30-14:50 |
‘Neonates Dissected: Perilous parturition and the precedence(?) of post-mortem reports in prosecutions of Infanticide, 1900-1935’ |
Prinisha Badassy (Wits) |
14:50-15:10 |
Questions and discussion |
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Panel 20: Medical Multiplicity 3 (13:30-15:10) Chair: Renee van der Wiel Venue A
13:30-13:50 |
‘The Medical Complex at Befelatanana in French Colonial Antananarivo, Madagascar’ |
Randall Bird (Wits) |
13:50-14:10 |
‘“These days one has to check one’s self”: traditional healers embrace medical intervention in the fight against HIV and AIDS’ |
Mzikazi Nduna (Wits) |
14:10-14:30 |
‘The use of metaphors in healthcare contexts in South Africa’ |
Claire Penn (Wits); Jennifer Watermeyer (Wits) |
14:30-14:50 |
‘Magical Empiricism and the “Exposed Being” in Public Health and Traditional Healing’ |
Robert Thornton (Wits) |
14:50-15:10 |
Questions and Discussion |
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15:10-15:30 Tea and coffee
Roundtable Discussion: (15:30-17:10) Chair: Alicia Wade Conference Room
15:30-17:00 |
The city, the mine and the hospital |
Keith Breckenridge (Wits); Karl van Holt (Wits); Gavin Churchyard (Aurum Institute for Health) |
Workshop: (15:30-17:10) Adler Museum: Wits Medical School
15:30-17:00 |
Subjectivity and the Arts in healing |
Lead by Steve Reid (UCT) and Patrice Repar (U New Mexico) |
Closing Plenary (17:15-17:30)
17:10-17:30 |
Closing remarks and farewell |
Catherine Burns (Wits) |