Societies and Cultures Institute

SCI Funds 'Fantastic' Healthscapes Workshop

On Wednesday 26th and Thursday 27th July 2023, the inaugural Healthscapes workshop took place at Reed Hall at the University of Exeter. Organised by Dr Semih Çelik, Dr Maziyar Ghiabi, and Dr Chris Sandal-Wilson, this international workshop on health and environment humanities in the Middle East and North Africa was supported by the Societies and Cultures Institute (SCI) at the University of Exeter, among other funders. 

Across the two days of the workshop, over a dozen participants joined the organisers in Exeter from Beirut, Delhi, Istanbul, and the United States, to share their ongoing, innovative research into how health and environment have intersected historically and today. The presentations highlighted the rich range of approaches scholars are adopting across disciplines, from close readings of nineteenth-century Ottoman cholera treatises and Indian Muslim pilgrims’ quarantine narratives to rich ethnographic fieldwork on imaginaries of river pollution and cancer in contemporary Lebanon, and plans are now underway to publish a special issue showcasing this work to wider audiences. 

In addition to the four themed panels, the workshop included an archive visit, a documentary screening, and a keynote lecture. Dr James Downs, archivist of the Middle East Collections at the University of Exeter, curated a special display of material from the Collections which – to the delight of participants – directly engaged many of the papers of the workshop, from burial spaces in Ottoman Izmir to malaria eradication in post-war Iraq to Palestinian mental health initiatives. The first day of the workshop concluded with a premiere screening of the documentary Beirut: The Aftermath, a moving investigation into the Beirut Port explosions of August 2019, followed by a live question and answer with the director, Fadia Ahmad. The workshop closed with Professor Jennifer L. Derr’s keynote on biomedicine, capitalist public health, and the scales of the body in Nasser’s Egypt, a tour-de-force which mapped the disease politics of the changing environmental context of the Nile River across the twentieth century, effortlessly interweaving the story of Cold War superpower competition with the lives of tiny river snails and the microscopic schistosoma they harboured. 

"It has been a fantastic event... This would not have been possible without [SCI's] kind support and flexibility"

Dr Chris Sandal-Wilson

Lecturer in Medical History

The workshop represented the successful launch event of the wider Healthscapes network, a network which aims to bring together researchers, activists, artists, and many others invested in understanding and responding to the entanglement of health and environment in the Middle East and North Africa in the past, present, and future. In addition to taking forward papers from the workshop for publication as a special issue, the organisers of the network are already planning follow-on events in the coming months, and are developing new, unique postgraduate teaching at the University of Exeter to allow students from all backgrounds to better understand this urgent contemporary issue. 

For more information on the workshop and the network, including future events, please see the project website: https://healthscapes.co.uk