Thursday 26 November | 15:00 - 17:00 | Online
Series Overview
Pandemics and their attendant impact on the cultural and political fibre of societies have accompanied human civilisation since its earliest days. The Antoine Plague of 165 – 180 AD swept through the Roman empire claiming an estimated 5 million lives and may have spread into Han China around the same time. The Black Death of 1347 – 1351 claimed an estimated 30 – 50% (200 million) of Europe’s population and triggered huge cultural shifts and political unrest. The global HIV pandemic which began in the early 1980s is estimated to have killed between 25 and 35 million people and, absent a vaccine, continues to have a considerable impact on many countries.
Participants in this series will consider the following questions:
How have we understood ourselves in relation to these pandemics, not only as health emergencies, but as cultural and historical phenomena?
How have different pandemics challenged or solidified pre-existing social stratification and inequalities?
How have pre-existing or new discourses of sickness, disability, religion, and morality been mobilised during different pandemics and in the years that followed them?
To what extent have historical discourses on pandemics and infectious disease in general survived into our own time and to what effect?
In what ways do different societies ‘remember’ great pandemics?
1. Panic and Response: Themes of Otherness and Exclusion in the Covid-19 Pandemic.
The covid-19 pandemic has widened the political, economic and cultural chasms in our society, accentuating pre-existing inequalities and mobilising narratives of otherness and exclusion through the culture of fear and paranoia it has created. For refugees and asylum seekers in settlements across Europe, global panic around coronavirus has served to consolidate their marginalisation and continued dehumanisation in both political and public discourse. Using the webinar lead’s experience in refugee camps in Northern France, and her work as a communications professional in the not-for-profit space, this webinar will examine how governments, media and NGOs alike have exploited the pandemic to further dismantle the humanity and dignity of Europe’s “outsiders”.
In this webinar, we will consider:
The socio-political contexts of the refugee settlements in Calais, particularly examining the importance of Calais’ geographical location in fostering narratives of exclusion and otherness.
Safety and securitisation: how the restrictions of the pandemic are being used to legitimise physical exclusion and violence in these areas and the toll this has taken on refugee and NGO communities.
The role of the media in propagating narratives of otherness, with particular emphasis on the British media’s portrayal of recent Channel crossings
The double standards of the NGO sector: exploring tropes of victimisation, virtue and homogeneity in charity communications.
By the end of this webinar, participants will have considered the layers of othering that contribute to our understanding of the refugee crisis and how these have been heightened by the pandemic. They will critically analyse the role of the media and the charity sector in encouraging tropes of villainisation and victimisation and how these inhibit the rights and dignity of displaced people.
This webinar will be delivered by Holly Hughes, a freelance writer with a background in public relations who holds a degree in English and French from the National University of Ireland, Galway as well as a Postgraduate Diploma in Public Relations. She has worked in the charity sector as a communications professional as well as spending prolonged periods as an education coordinator and language teacher for adults in refugee camps in Northern France and Greece.