Funding for Notre Dame Faculty 2019-2020
The Reilly Center solicited applications for grants of $1500 to fund academic lectures and other events on the ND campus during the 2019-2020 academic year that address the intersection of science, technology and society, broadly defined.
Winning Proposals
October 14, 2019 (submitted by Maria Alexandrova)
4:30pm - 5:30pm
125 DeBartolo Hall
"Fight Abortion, Not Women": Understanding the Challenges of Russian Reproductive Politics
Michele Rivkin-Fish, Associate Professor of Anthropology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abstract: In 2011, the first grassroots public campaign to defend abortion as a legally accessible procedure emerged in Russia: “Fight Abortion, Not Women,” the on-line campaign insisted, using a slogan that differs dramatically from “pro-choice” advocacy in the U.S. Moreover, a phrase in the campaign’s url, “protivabort,” or “against abortion,” also challenged Western assumptions about how abortion debates are structured. This presentation will explain why many Russian defenders of legal access to abortion characterize themselves as “against abortion,” by examining the history of reproductive politics in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. It will also explore the changes occurring in family planning since the end of the Soviet era, and discuss the challenges and opportunities characterizing women’s health and advocacy in contemporary Russian society.
January 30, 2020 (submitted by Erika Doss)
4:30pm - 5:30pm
Location TBA
The Messiness of the Moral of Interspecies Encounters in Medical Lab Research
Lesley A. Sharp, Barbara Chamberlain & Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Chair in Anthropology, Barnard College and Senior Research Scientist in Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Abstract: Lab research is guided by a host of standardized, ethical standards that shape quotidian practices of animal welfare and care while, oddly, obscuring, erasing, or denying human efforts at self-care. An attentiveness to the “messiness of the moral” uncovers the complexities of interspecies encounters in science, offering, in turn, possibilities for the (re)making of the researcher, and, thus, of the “whole physician" in and outside the lab.
April 15, 2020 (submitted by Kathleen Eggleson)
Time & Location TBA
Materializing Illness: Collaborating Across Art and Bioethics
Devan Stahl, Assistant Professor of Religion at Baylor University
Darian Stahl, American Printmaker and Bookmaker and PhD Humanities student at Concordia University
Abstract: The presenters explore the intersections of biomedicine, narrative, and fine art to shed light on the meaning of illness. Dr. Devan Stahl will narrate her experience of being diagnosed with MS through the use of MRIs and how those images came to shape her understanding of illness. From her perspective as a medical ethicist, chaplain, and patient, these medical imagines cannot capture the lived experience of illness within individual bodies or within the cultural context. Dr. Stahl will place that pathography into typologies commonly used in literature and medical humanities to reveal the types of illness narratives that are frequently underrepresented. The second presenter, Darian Goldin Stahl, MFA, will describe how she uses those same MRIs and other medical ephemera from the scanning process to create prints, installations, and Artists’ books that layer flesh and scans to sensorially nuance the lived experiences of illness. By merging representations of their own bodies, the presenters reconstruct ill-identity in mutuality. Together, the Stahls investigate the significance of this patient-printmaker collaboration, including how it challenges the power-ontology of biomedicine and what possibilities emerge as a result of making space for a multidisciplinary perspective on illness.
April 22. 2020 (submitted by Vanesa Miseres)
Time & Location TBA
Charlatans and Medicine in 19th-Century Latin America
Irina Podgorny, Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute in the History of Science and Permanent Research Fellow at the Argentine National Council of Science (CONICET)Abstract: The charlatan (or quack) is a historical character defined by his itinerant existence. Traveling from one marketplace to another, dealing in exotic objects and remedies, organizing shows and exhibitions, performing miraculous cures by appealing to the healing power of words and medicaments, charlatans have traversed Europe since medieval times. Far from being confined to certain countries or regions, they were everywhere, repeating almost the same sales strategies, the same words, the same sequence of performances. Podgorny’s lecture will present the network of itinerant characters that circulated antiquities, photographs, remedies, and natural history collections in South America from the 1860s to the 1880s, in order to shed light on the role of traveling conmen, quacks, and charlatans as both agents of the circulation of knowledge and intermediaries between professional and popular medicine.