Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC)
An OsloMet Centre of Research Excellence studying the societal aspects of pandemics
Weekly Zoom seminars held by invited international pandemic researchers.
If you missed our second Pandemics & Society Seminar of the 2023–24 academic year with PANSOC postdoc Maria Dunbar, you can catch up with the video here.
Recordings of all of our Seminars, beginning with the Fall 2021 series, are available here.
For the second Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2023 series, our own Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar (PANSOC) will discuss her MSCA Project Proposal on historical endemic diseases. The seminar will be held on Thursday, 7 September at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Abstract
Tuberculosis is a disease which has long affected humans and can be fatal if not treated. While incidence is low in Norway currently, some cases are found annually, and latent tuberculosis and anti-microbial resistant tuberculosis remain a public health concern today. Historical records gathered during the nineteenth century have not been examined and may provide insights into the use of isolation as a treatment option. I will construct models to analyse data from these records following lines of inquiry developed using the syndemics framework.
About the Speaker
Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar is an an early career researcher in infectious disease modelling at the Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society at OsloMet. She has experience of applications of modelling approaches to problems in environmental epidemiology and infectious disease epidemiology. Her current research interest is endemic diseases and how different population groups are disproportionately at risk of and affected by them.
If you missed our first Pandemics & Society Seminar of the 2023–24 academic year with Eevi Juuti of the RECIPE Project and the University of Oulo, you can catch up with the video here.
Recordings of all of our Seminars, beginning with the Fall 2021 series, are available here.
We are pleased to welcome Eevi Juuti (University of Oulu) to present at the first meeting of the Fall 2023 Pandemics & Society Seminar Series, on Thursday, 24 August (1600 CEST). Information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series here.
Abstract
The first part of the presentation will take an overview of the RECIPE project (Resistant Cities. Urban Planning as Means for Pandemic Prevention), which explores the relationship between built environments and pandemics. The second part will further discuss findings of the study so far.
About the RECIPE Project
The RECIPE project explores the role of urban living environments and the potential of urban planning in anticipation and prevention of infectious diseases and thus pandemic outbreaks. The project combines expertise from the fields of environmental research, environmental health, history, information studies, public health, and urban planning. The project engages citizens, SMEs, planners and health professionals, cross-sectional institutions, and decision makers. The project provides new scientific knowledge of the linkages between urban living environments and health, deepens societal understanding of the linkages, develops tools and methods for resistant urban planning, and encourages cross-sectorial discussions and integrative policies between urban planning and health sectors.
About the Speaker
Eevi Juuti is an architect, urban planner and a doctoral researcher at the University of Oulu specializing in the use of service design and design thinking in the context of built environment. She has also been working with topics concerning environmental health. Now she is working with RECIPE (Resistant Cities. Urban Planning as Means for Pandemic Prevention) project, which explores the relationship between built environments and pandemics.
We are pleased to release the schedule for our Fall 2023 seminar series. As in previous series, the seminar will be held via Zoom at 16.00 Central European Time on Thursdays.
To access the Zoom meetings, please join our mailing list here.
24 August
Urban Planning as a Means of Pandemic Prevention – A Look into the RECIPE Project
Eevi Juuti, University of Oulu
7 September – PANSOC MSCA Candidates
Navigating Bias: The Formation of Environmental Collective Perception and Prejudice during San Francisco Plague, 1900
Daijun Liu, Tsinghua University
Title TBA
Maria Dunbar, Oslo Metropolitan University
14 September
On the Move: Fine-Tuning Plague Dispersal in the North Caucasus and Altai-Sayan during Early Bronze Age Human Migrations (3300–2500 BCE)
Rebecca Main, University of Stirling
21 September
The Political Effects of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Weimar Germany
Erik Hornung, University of Cologne
12 October
The Cholera Pandemic of 1903–05 and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in the Philippines
Francis A. Gealogo, Ateneo de Manila University
19 October
The Grenfell Mission and the 1918 influenza pandemic in Labrador
Uddhav Khakurel, Oslo Metropolitan University
2 November
Geographical inequalities in health during the COVID-19 pandemic in England
Natalie Bennett, Newcastle University
**For our attendees outside of Europe, please note that Central European Summer Time ends on 29 October**
9 November
Age Patterns of Mortality During the Influenza Pandemics of the 20th Century
Lauren Steele, University of Queensland
30 November
Simulating COVID-19’s impact on mental health: An agent-based modelling approach
Kristina Thompson, Wageningen University
If you missed the webinar “The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic for First Nations Peoples and Communities: the role of leadership and governance in addressing policy gaps and barriers to access” by Dr. Marcia Anderson, catch up here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PZc4GDE_4kImJFqKSVcFVPYWXsfbZ1rq/view?usp=sharing
Other past webinars can be found here:
Watch Courtney Heffernan, University of Alberta, talk about “Tuberculosis elimination in low prevalence settings: research and implementation” here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hMHcehOHZC9_CKCRlgWd37u1VIBQkbRe/view?usp=share_link
And be sure to catch up on other past webinars too:
The final PANSOC webinar of the semester will be on 27 April at 1600 Oslo time. Dr. Marcia Anderson will present: “The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic for First Nations Peoples and Communities: the role of leadership and governance in addressing policy gaps and barriers to access.” Contact jessicad@oslomet.no for a link.
Dr. Marcia Anderson is Cree-Anishinaabe and grew up in the North End of Winnipeg. Her family roots go to Peguis First Nation and Norway House Cree Nation in Manitoba. She practices both Internal Medicine and Public Health. She is the Vice-Dean, Indigenous Health, Social Justice and Anti-Racism and the Executive Director of Indigenous Academic Affairs in the Ongomiizwin Indigenous Institute of Health and Healing, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Manitoba. She serves as the Chair of the Indigenous Health Committee of the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada and the Chair of the National Consortium for Indigenous Medical Education. She was recognized for her contributions to Indigenous Peoples health with a National Aboriginal Achievement Award in March 2011. In 2018 and 2022 she was named one of the 100 most powerful women in Canada by the Women’s Executive Network. In 2021 she received the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Dr. Thomas Dignan Indigenous Health Award, and in 2022 was named the Doctors Manitoba Physician of the Year. She was also the recipient of a Community Development Award from the Mahatma Gandhi Centre of Canada and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration in 2022.
If you missed Helga E. Bories-Sawala’s webinar, The forgotten pandemic that created today’s America: A look at the history textbooks of Québec, catch up here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wvyonGLl33j1OfbggRV-q5yrdRfrezLv/view?usp=sharing
And other past webinars can be found here:
On 20 April at 1600 CET, Courtney Heffernan, University of Alberta, will present: “Tuberculosis elimination in low prevalence settings: research and implementation.”
Courtney will talk about the implications of an unfinished pandemic (TB) on underserved populations in high-income settings; i.e. for Canada TB disproportionately affects Indigenous peoples and migrants, but strategic efforts to succeed are different for each. Among the former, snuffing out transmission and outbreaks remain paramount while for the latter expanding screening and prophylaxis to prevent reactivation is key. Determining the feasibility of screening and treating TB infection in migrants is so important to achieve elimination since the reservoirs are being replenished by imported prevalent infections. Meanwhile, Canada is setting increasingly ambitious targets for immigration (500,000 per annum by 2025, which is ~double the annual average for the last 20 yrs) with no strategic plan for TB.
Courtney Heffernan has a PhD in Medicine from the University of Alberta, and since 2010 she has been working as the manager of the Tuberculosis Program Evaluation and Research Unit there. Her work is focused on pulmonary tuberculosis, and elimination with an emphasis on transmission. She is a member of STOP TB Canada’s Steering Committee, and the CDC’s TB Trials Consortium’s Implementation and Quality Committee.
Contact jessicad@oslomet.no for a link.
