An OsloMet Centre of Research Excellence studying the societal aspects of pandemics
Last month, Carla Louise Hughes, Nan Zou Bakkeli, and Jessica Dimka talked about PANSOC research related to mental health and pandemics, as part of OsloMet’s marking of World Mental Health Day. The lunch seminar (lunsjpåfyll) was organized by the University Library, and a video is available here: https://filmet.no/lunsjpafyll-mental-health-and
Please join us on 11 November at 1600 CET for the next PANSOC webinar with Sharon DeWitte from the University of South Carolina. Contact jessicad@oslomet.no for a link.
Social Inequality and Pandemic Mortality: the Biosocial Context of the 14th-Century Black Death
Dr. DeWitte will discuss her bioarchaeological research on demographic and health trends before, during, and after the 14th-century Black Death in London. Her research reveals declines in health before the Black Death, but improvements thereof in the aftermath of the epidemic. These trends occurred in the context of changes in social inequality, highlighting its potential role in shaping health outcomes during infectious disease pandemics.
Dr. Sharon DeWitte (PhD. 2006, Pennsylvania State University) is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. She is a biological anthropologist who specializes in paleodemography and paleoepidemiology – the reconstruction of population-level patterns of demography (mortality, fertility, and migration) and health using human skeletal remains ethically excavated and curated from archaeological sites. She is particularly interested in infectious diseases and famine conditions in the past, and focuses on determining how factors such as sex, gender, social status, health, developmental stress, nutritional status, and geographic origin affected risks of mortality during such crises. For over 15 years, her research has primarily focused on trends in health and demography before, during, and after the 14th-century outbreak of bubonic plague, the “Black Death”, in England. She is also generally interested in expanding the tools available to bioarchaeologists to examine health in the past in ways that put them in dialogue with human biologists studying living people. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the School for Advanced Research.
Now, she is making an impact as a member of the team at the Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society. Read a new interview with here: UK native named Student of the Year – OsloMet
The three PANSOC-affiliated masters students, Carla Hughes, Lara Steinmetz and Christina Torjussen, all presented their projects at a pandemic research student conference in Bergen 27. October. We at PANSOC are super-proud of the all and Christina even won a prize for her work and presentation.
If you missed this week’s webinar, you can catch up here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1op1HBfBqw7e3qZ9c6nrHZOY8MLwaSww5/view?usp=sharing
And all our past webinars are here:
Please join us October 28 at 1600 CET for the next PANSOC webinar. Contact jessicad@oslomet.no if you need a Zoom link.
Hampton Gaddy, University of Oxford, will present: “Re-estimating the global and national death tolls of the 1918-20 pandemic: Updating Johnson and Mueller (2002).”
The last two decades have seen the study of the 1918-20 influenza pandemic emerge as a field in its own right; the quantitative and qualitative description of most aspects of the pandemic have improved greatly in their depth and rigour. However, there has been little organised progress towards refining the available estimates of how many deaths the pandemic caused on global, regional, and national levels since the often-cited work of Johnson and Mueller (2002). In this paper, I perform an extensive literature review to chart the progress of the last twenty years in this area, and in doing so, I propose new consensus estimates of the pandemic’s death toll within more than 140 national borders. From those estimates, I produce three main results. First, I suggest that the pandemic killed 45 to 60 million people globally. This estimate equates to 2.4% to 3.2% of the world population at the time and is the narrowest well-founded global estimate to date. Second, I note the main geographical and contextual gaps in the field’s understanding of the pandemic’s mortality on the national level. In particular, I point out the lack of research on indigenous and military populations, as well as Eastern Europe, China, the Middle East, North Africa, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. Third, I use my revised national mortality estimates to demonstrate that several high-profile findings about the pandemic, its global correlates, and its global effects are poorly founded.
Hampton Gaddy is an MPhil Candidate in Sociology and Demography at the University of Oxford. His work on this topic was awarded the Oxford Institute of Human Sciences’ 2021 Wilma Crowther Prize for best BA dissertation.
I denne kronikken skrevet av Vibeke Narverud Nyborg og senterleder Mamelund, diskuterers ulike grunnet til at vi ble overrumplet av covid-19. For å være forberedt neste gang er det kritisk at fagmiljøene tar vare på det pandemiske minne. Les kronikken i Aftenposten her: Hvorfor ble vi tatt på sengen av covid-19? (aftenposten.no)
Please join us for our next webinar – contact jessicad@oslomet.no if you need a Zoom link.
From Cholera to COVID19: Continuity and Change in Iran’s Pandemic Experience.
Amir A. Afkhami will present an overview of pandemic cholera’s seminal role in the emergence and development of modernity in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including cholera’s transformative impact on the country’s governance and changing perspectives on medicine, disease, and public health. And the continuity of these historic and political determinants in Tehran’s public health policy against the current COVID19 pandemic.
Amir A. Afkhami, MD, PhD, DFAPA is an associate professor with joint appointments in psychiatry, global health, and history at the George Washington University. He is also the clerkship director and director of medical student education at the George Washington University School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and recipient of the APA’s Roeske Award for Excellence in Medical Student Education. He is the author of A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran’s Age of Cholera (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). Previously, he served on the legislative staff of US Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) as an RWJF Health Policy Fellow, and has led a number of international capacity building initiatives in conflict zones including the U.S. State Department’s Iraq Mental Health Initiative to rebuild Iraq’s mental health delivery capabilities.
Watch the latest webinar here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CX8iZ4_mVED_2YIMuHOLIr6t9EF1_ImO/view?usp=sharing
You can read more about some of the referenced research here:
Plague in seventeenth-century Europe and the decline of Italy: an epidemiological hypothesis
Epidemics, Inequality and Poverty in Preindustrial and Early Industrial Times
And catch up on other past webinars here:
Due to unexpected circumstances, the webinar with Lianne Tripp will not be held. We hope to reschedule it in the future.
