Immunity and the Humanities
FUNDING
Uehiro Oxford Institute
PROJECT DATES
Project duration: 3 years (1st October 2025 – 30th September 2028)
PI
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
This Uehiro-Medical Humanities program - a collaboration between TORCH Medical Humanities and the Uehiro Oxford Institute- aims at deploying and developing new interdisciplinary, humanities-based methodologies to address key issues in public health, particularly regarding ethical connotations and societal perception of infectious diseases and of the medical, public health, and societal measures to tackle them.
Discourse around vaccines and immunity exemplify broader ethical and political tensions in public health. Talk of vaccines is heavily moralized. As historian Elena Conis’ pointed out, "vaccines have never been merely medical, but always infused with politics, social values, and cultural norms". These values and norms set societal expectations around vaccination, affect our moral judgement of those who do and don’t vaccinate, and divide societies into groups according to vaccination status. Besides, talk of vaccines in public discourse, public health communication, and indeed within the medical and life sciences is characterized by frequent use of metaphors and analogies. Metaphors and analogies easily transfer, ethical, political, and cultural values across contexts. Some of this language and of its ethical-political connotation has to do with the notion of immunity. Creating "immunological memory" is what, medically, distinguishes a vaccine from other medical interventions, including other preventative ones. However, immunity is a concept that pervades public health more generally and it is not ethically neutral. In philosophy of biology, for instance, immunity is often taken demarcate individual’s biological identity, by setting boundaries with invaders. And military metaphors around immunity abound. None of this is ethically or politically innocent.
Interdisciplinary humanities-based methodologies that this program aims to develop involving philosophy, history, anthropology, linguistics, literature, the social sciences, can help better understand ethical and political discussion as well as public attitudes around public health, public health policy in general, and vaccination specifically.
The program involves
Network formation
Creating a network of academics, mostly from the humanities, working in areas related to immunization, vaccination, and public health domains that are relevant to understanding the special status of vaccines and of the notion of immunity from an ethical, sociological, cultural, ethical, and historical perspective. This integrates Oxford’s wealth of humanities expertise around medicine and health with the world-class scientists working around vaccination, epidemiology, and public health.
Public engagement
Involving the public in conversation on vaccine and public health from humanities perspectives and working with their feedback, especially at the local level (Oxford and Oxfordshire). This program will focus on engagement with local communities and local authorities. The University of Oxford’s Participatory Research initiative will also be used to create co-production activities, coordinated by Dr Sally Frampton.
Methodology development
Developing methodologies for humanities-based, interdisciplinary understanding of vaccines and public health, which would allow to develop new research paths. Interdisciplinary work within the humanities is particularly challenging because, even more so than within science, different humanities disciplines share very different aims, research questions, and methodologies. Experimenting together through interdisciplinary events focused on a specific topic – in this case vaccination, immunity, and related themes in public health – is the best way not only to develop methodologies that could be used for future interdisciplinary research, but also to better understand the limitations of interdisciplinary humanities work. The challenge is to create something new and meaningful across disciplines without sacrificing each discipline’s own identity.
