BFI collaboration: After The End
Interdisciplinary approaches to lived experiences in the aftermaths of diseases, disasters and drugs in global health
When global outbreaks of disease are declared ‘over’, what, when and for whom is an end ‘the end’ and what happens after? How do declarations of ends shape personal experiences of crises, ongoing access to care, health and obligations?
After The End is a project led by Professor Patricia Kingori, funded by a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award.
For part of the project, Patricia is working with the BFI (as part of a wider strategic partnership between the BFI and TORCH) to use their archive. The postdoctoral researcher on this collaboration is Kelechi Anucha.
Patricia says: “In the first approach we explored materials across different categories of media from the existing online and wider BFI archives specifically relating to public health emergencies - epidemics and pandemics. In the second approach, we engaged in a more conceptual examination of the limits or ‘endings’ of archives themselves, using the BFI archives as a case study.” (Click here to read more in a blog.)
More about After The End
Global health is defined by narratives of a clearly discernible and singular end. Official announcements of ‘the end’, however, are often arbitrary and unstable. Furthermore, they can distract from important counter-narratives and undermine social, environmental, political and epistemic justice when those ‘left behind’ are excluded from discussions of whether the end has been achieved, or is achievable, and if so when and how. Today, uncertain trajectories, the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, passive attrition of many diseases, and drug resistances question ideas of a singular extinction event and finality.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach involving historians, sociologists, epidemiologists, psychologists, bioethicists, literary and legal scholars, philosophers and policymakers, this timely and important research has two synergistic empirical and normative aims:
1. to explore lived experiences of time and temporality of endings of crises, to capture counter-narratives and their implications for future practices, responses and policies, and
2. to provide an account of the moral and ethical obligations and responsibilities of global health institutions in the aftermaths of crises to health.
From detailed comparative research in three countries, including ethnographic, cognitive time-perception and archival methodologies, we will foreground the people, places, processes and policies to capture everyday experiences of endings and aftermaths in context.
The full After The End project is led by:
Prof Patricia Kingori University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Prof Laura Salisbury University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Dr Haja Wurie University of Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone
Prof Emily Chan Chinese University of Hong Kong
Prof Dora Vargha University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Prof Sharifah Sekalala University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Prof Debora Diniz Anis Instituto de Bioética, Brazil
Dr Ruth Ogden Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom
