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Wed 12 April
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Thu 13 April
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Fri 14 April
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Sat 15 April
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Friday 14 April 2023 14.00 - 16.00
D-11 POL15 Science, Medicine and State Politics
B22
Network: Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chairs: -
Organizers: - Discussants: -
Alison Carrol : Imagining Channel Crossings in 1920s Europe
The end of the First World War saw a flurry of proposals for new forms of crossing the English Channel/la Manche. From a suspension bridge to a tubular railway, from ferry boats to the reinvigoration of calls for a Channel Tunnel, voices from across Europe proposed new means of crossing ... (Show more)
The end of the First World War saw a flurry of proposals for new forms of crossing the English Channel/la Manche. From a suspension bridge to a tubular railway, from ferry boats to the reinvigoration of calls for a Channel Tunnel, voices from across Europe proposed new means of crossing the sea between France and the British Isles and eventually settled upon an undersea tunnel as the best means of creating a fixed link. These proposals built upon developments in technology and infrastructure, particularly during the War. But they were also informed by the new world of the 1920s where the construction of a lasting peace was a preoccupation of international statesmen and where new ideas emerged about citizenship and national belonging. Channel Tunnel societies were formed in France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy, and lobbied for the construction of a tunnel. Meanwhile the League of Nations discussed plans for an undersea railway as part of plans to link the continent of Europe with Africa and the Middle East. For many of the tunnel’s supporters, the construction of a tunnel would be a symbol of France and Britain’s relationship, as well as a means to bring economic prosperity to Europe. For opponents, however, the tunnel presented a security risk, a potential economic catastrophe, as well as a threat to the coherence of national communities.
This paper draws upon state and civil society archival records from France, Britain and Switzerland to consider the ways in which Channel crossings were imagined in Europe after the First World War. At the heart of these documents is the question of whether it was a good thing to make border crossing easier, and in analysing the varied responses that this question provoked, the paper sheds light upon the different ways in which border crossings were imagined in different national contexts and social groups, and reveals the imagined implications of border crossings for national communities in 1920s Europe. (Show less)

Hannah Proctor : Technologies of the Inner Self: US Social Science, Projective Testing and the 'Soviet Mind' at the Dawn of the Cold War
In 'Database of Dreams' Rebecca Lemov asks 'how technology can embed itself in subjectivity and how subjectivity shapes and is shaped by technology.’ She analyses technologies and projective tests designed to give insights into human subjectivity, and discussing the Rorschach tests conducted with twenty-one Nazi detainees at Nuremberg in the ... (Show more)
In 'Database of Dreams' Rebecca Lemov asks 'how technology can embed itself in subjectivity and how subjectivity shapes and is shaped by technology.’ She analyses technologies and projective tests designed to give insights into human subjectivity, and discussing the Rorschach tests conducted with twenty-one Nazi detainees at Nuremberg in the mid-1940s noting that at this moment 'the projective test was king of technologies for
seeing into the inner self.’

Five years later similar tests were carried out just 100 miles from Nuremberg by psychologists involved with the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Rather than seeking to gain an insight into the so-called 'Nazi mind’, however, these social scientists were instead hoping to gain an understanding of Communist mentality by conducting clinical trials with Soviet displaced persons. Their experiments were designed to expose
the specificities of Soviet subjectivity but this paper will instead ask what they reveal about the vision of the self these North American social scientists were operating with, comparing their methods to those of contemporaneous Soviet psychologists who rejected methods of
standardised testing.

Commissioned by the US Air Force as the Cold War was beginning to take shape as a battle of ideologies, the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS) officially participated in the US state’s attempt to understand and defeat the communist ‘enemy’. This paper intends to explore a contradiction inherent to the HPSSS between the hermetic
image of Soviet society and psychology it attempted to construct in theory, and the displacement and cross-cultural encounters that characterised it in practice, asking whether the project disrupted some of the very stereotyped cultural assumptions it was intended to uncover. By looking more closely at the clinical materials produced by the project I intend to explore how the in-person encounters the HPSSS enabled encouraged forms of exchange that undercut rather than bolstered stereotyped images of Soviet people; how a project intended to formalize and deepen divides also bridged them. (Show less)

Anastassiya Schacht : International Advocacy Groups Opposing the Political Use of Psychiatry in the USSR of the 1970-1980s
Over the course of the 1960s-1980s, Soviet psychiatry became internationally challenged on its established practice to falsely diagnose, confine, and forcibly treat political dissidents, opposing the Communist regime. The mounting evidence of malpractices unleashed, westwards of the Iron Curtain, a broad public outcry: media, politicians, and international Human Rights advocacy ... (Show more)
Over the course of the 1960s-1980s, Soviet psychiatry became internationally challenged on its established practice to falsely diagnose, confine, and forcibly treat political dissidents, opposing the Communist regime. The mounting evidence of malpractices unleashed, westwards of the Iron Curtain, a broad public outcry: media, politicians, and international Human Rights advocacy groups intervened on behalf of confined Soviet activists. Psychiatrists, scholars, and medical professionals worldwide saw themselves confronted with the need to strike a balance between a moral necessity to condemn their Soviet peers – and the threat of being, case of any distinctive action, considered politicized, Cold War biased and, thus, “unscholarly”.
My talk embeds the conflict around the Soviet psychiatry into a rapidly changing world-map of the late and post-Détente, where Human Rights emerged prominently as a central piece in the political struggle of the superpowers to deliver on their respective visions for a better world. In this ever more intertwined, though conflicted and ideologically split world from early 1970, I trace the routes used up by smaller advocacy groups, who intervened on behalf of Soviet Human Rights activists.
These advocacy groups acted as mediators as they carried information across the “Iron Curtain”, dispersed it to media, reached out and engaged politicians and various kinds of scholars, medical professionals, as well into larger expert organizations at home and on the international stage. Their agendas circulated from individual working groups and committees into their domestic – and then the World Psychiatric Association, and into the intergovernmental bodies of the UN-system, including the World Health Organization and Human Rights Council.
Comparing varying success of reach-outs into these International Organizations I draw conclusions on how Human Rights violations, institutionally engrained into large-scale authoritarian regimes, can be internationally traced and sanctioned. (Show less)

Vaclav Smidrkal : Antifascists into Patients. Transnational Medical Knowledge and War Participants’ Welfare in Czechoslovakia after 1945
This paper seeks to explore how changing medical understanding of the impact of war on human health translated into welfare programs for war victims and veterans in Czechoslovakia after 1945. The early post-1945 system of welfare benefits for war participants was actually a re-make of fundaments that had been laid ... (Show more)
This paper seeks to explore how changing medical understanding of the impact of war on human health translated into welfare programs for war victims and veterans in Czechoslovakia after 1945. The early post-1945 system of welfare benefits for war participants was actually a re-make of fundaments that had been laid down in late Habsburg empire already and adopted by Czechoslovakia after 1918. During Stalinism in 1950s this system was dismantled altogether as a relic of the past. In lieu of previous ‘humiliating’ social policies for war participants, the complex socialist welfare state should suffice to do justice to this group, too. Medical experts (and war participants themselves) around professor of hygiene František Bláha challenged these views on health and welfare benefits since late 1950s. Referring to medical knowledge produced by various foreign experts, circulated by international organisations and replicated in Czechoslovakia, they brought up medical arguments for reassessment of war participants’ social needs. They argued that ‘war’ impacted health as a serious disease even if the patient did not have to feel subjective symptoms afterwards or even if these symptoms were misunderstood by doctors. Adverting to the ‘quality of life’ as a goal of socialist medicine, they pleaded for new programmes of preventive medicine and a re-evaluation of old-age pensions schemes for war participants. Using the national organization of war participants as a vehicle for lobbying in the more liberal 1960s, they finally managed to transform medical knowledge into a policy change. While political criteria remained important and these doctors were conforming to them, they brought in a new and long-lasting perspective on war participants’ welfare. (Show less)



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