Preliminary Programme

Concerning public health and the wider wellbeing of the state, vaccines in their nature have a representative dimension, allowing their semantics to go beyond their medicinal purpose and become a means of propaganda. In addition, the inextricable link between vaccines and public health notably leads to significant changes in privacy usually associated with healthcare. For example, Hippocratic values such as confidentiality and trust become increasingly difficulty to maintain as the responsibilities of doctors are essentially elevated to state level. In relation to the focus of this paper, these developments are highlighted by the German Democratic Republic’s poliomyelitis vaccination campaign from 1960 to 1965. From the 1950s onwards, the GDR adopted the slogan, ‘prophylaxis is the best form of socialism’, as a defining principle of the state’s medical ethics, leading to the poliomyelitis campaign to be contextualised within the Cold War propaganda battle between East and West Germany. Moreover, focusing on East Berlin, this paper is primarily concerned with the state’s dynamics of interaction with GDR citizens and the propaganda they experienced during the vaccination campaign. Whilst focusing on the theme of privacy to examine the state’s preoccupation with public health, this paper will apply Edward Soja’s ‘Thirdspace’ theory to explore the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ spaces of the GDR’s poliomyelitis vaccination campaign. Such analysis will involve an examination of the GDR’s medical ethics and how they were propagandistically envisaged at both a state and local level. Furthermore, analysis will also place vaccination centres within their wider propagandistic environment. By using Geographical Information Systems, the paper will map the location of each vaccination centre used during the campaign in East Berlin. Adopting this approach will highlight the geographical areas in which citizens navigated through on their journeys to and from vaccination centres, illustrating proximity to notable public spaces and infrastructure such as train stations. Significantly, this will provide a broader understanding of the cultural experience of the campaign as it will allow for further insight into the propaganda forces GDR citizens were exposed to. Thus, altogether this paper will examine the relationship between the spatial presence of the vaccine itself, the physical environment of the vaccination campaign, and their ‘imagined’ propaganda significance to the GDR. (Show less)

My multi-year project on Gulag spaces in public memory analyzes the process in which the physical spaces of former GULAG compounds are being re-conceptualized by people who encounter them on a daily basis and who have learned to use these structures to their own advantage. Among diverse forms of the metamorphosis of the Gulag spaces, some have become attractive as real estate, praised by their new owners for their convenience, size, and even craftsmanship. Other structures have acquired a new meaning and life as modern object of urban development unrelated to residential use (becoming factories, schools, or even department stores). Yet there is also a growing number of Gulag spaces that are becoming desirable for their touristic value. These former labor camps support a booming tourist industry that caters to a rapidly growing number of domestic and foreign adventurers seeking new thrills or intellectual stimulation (or both) in remote locations. In some cases, business owners in the sphere of tourism use these physical sites to channel scholarly fascination with the scope of human tragedy, and they purposefully advertise such sites, maintain them, or even add fabricated detail to them in order to emphasize the social rupture, the sacrifice, the loss, and the full extent of human tragedy. In other cases, the touristic appeal has emerged from the spontaneous expression of the curiosity of the select few who have been fascinated with the remoteness and the natural beauty of the camp settings, and hence such places have become intentionally disavowed or overlooked as sites of memory and mourning. In such advertising campaigns, the spaces of human suffering become akin to Jack London’s Klondike and even Conan Doyle’s Lost World, no longer 'mere' Gulag structures but sites of wild and exotic adventures of the strong-built and the strong-willed. Yet in both instances, such tourist uses deform and reshape the public engagement with the Gulag spaces and distort the public memory of the past.
As such, my presentation addresses the complexity of retaining Gulag memories in light of new public uses of structures associated with the experience, paying a special attention to the distortions created by the tourist industry that uses such sites for profit without any regard for historic preservation. My research project draws upon extensive fieldwork conducted over a half dozen years in the Perm krai, central Siberian regions, Yakutia, Magadan, Kolyma, and the Russian Far East. Enhanced by a broad body of scholarship on the interrelation of space and memory, my paper also presents a rich array of visual and oral history sources to demonstrate how pockets of memory appear when people choose to selectively dissociate the physical space from its prior meaning. (Show less)