Mon, 4 October 2021 - Mon, 4 October 2021, 12:15pm
Zoom Webinar,
Free to attend, but booking is required. Tickets
Carla Tsampiras will speak on ‘”What are you historically classified as?” Reflections of an Historian in Health Sciences in a Time of Transformation.’
This seminar will run as part of the ‘Doing History’ events series, led by AboutFace York in affiliation with the Centre for Global Health Histories.
A recent survey sent to staff and students at the University of Cape Town dealt sensitively with the question of racial identity and asked participants to indicate ‘what they [were] historically classified as?’ This transformation survey is one in a series of responses to historical redress, ongoing social injustice, increasing inequalities, and growing demands for substantive transformation in the university.
A series of local and global movements and events, including #Fees Must Fall and #Rhodes Must Fall, #FHS Hierarchy, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and ‘the decolonial turn’ have, as this seminar series suggests, brought conversations about histories and identities to the fore amongst a new generation. These are conversations about histories manifest in and on land, spaces, buildings, knowledge, and bodies linked to a species heading for extinction.
Interrogating how we are currently ‘Doing History’ in history departments is important, but so too is interrogating how histories and historical consciousness are understood or engaged with in other faculties. For the last seven years I have taught medical and health humanities inspired curricula, with a strong focus on historical consciousness, to undergraduate and postgraduate students studying health sciences. During this time several incidents related to racism and racial identity have provoked discussion, protest, and backlash. They have also evoked and invoked ‘History’ and histories, even as the discipline and craft (in all its forms) is little understood. In this paper I reflect on the understandings and expectations of histories that I have encountered and the many faces history and historians may need to reveal as we consider the evolution of the discipline and its practitioners and how we will be classified in the future.
The discipline of History has changed radically over recent decades, as insights from other fields and interdisciplinary approaches have become more mainstream. Core questions remain, especially in light of Black Lives Matter, and related political and social movements that show how important and influential representations of the past can be in the present.
In connection with the Centre for Global Health Histories, AboutFace will hold a webinar featuring presentations on the broad question of ‘Doing History’, exploring methodological and epistemological questions about how we research, write and communicate History as an academic, societal and political endeavour. This webinar has an interdisciplinary and international outlook.
The webinar will be held online via Zoom.