Reproducing History: Writing Histories of the Personal
Our last working group meeting of the year will take place in hybrid format at the University of Edinburgh on 15 July 2024. This event will feature a sneak peek of Agnes Arnold Forster and filmmaker Rita Conry's new Birth Control Documentary: High, Soft and Open. We will also discuss future plans for the working group, develop planned network outputs, and reflect on what it means to research and write "histories of the personal."
Unlike other meetings, this session will be a half-day event (running from 2:30-6:30 BST, or 9:30-1:30 EDT).
Our schedule is as follows:
- 2:30pm BST (9:30 EDT): Hybrid Screening of Birth Control Documentary High, Soft and Open with Agnes Arnold Forster and Filmmaker Rita Conry
- 3:30pm BST (10:30 EDT): Comfort Break
- 3:45-4:45pm BST (10:45-11:45 EDT): Hybrid Discussion: Year 2 of the working group; Next steps for the group
- 4:45pm BST (11:45 EDT): Comfort Break
- 5:00-6:30pm BST (12:00-1:30 EDT): Hybrid History of the Personal Readings Discussion
Please feel free to join us online for some or all of these events.
In preparation for this meeting, we ask that members review the following four pieces:
- Jaipreet Virdi, "Seeing the Tangled Tendrils Within: Feeling/Seeing Endometriosis beyond Invisibility," Forthcoming in Biomedical Visions: Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Medical Practice, edited by Elizabeth Hughes and Alfred Freeborn.
- Madeline Bosco and Connie Clement, “Getting Rid of the Crab,” Healthsharing v 2, n3 (1981): p4 (brief editorial collective notes) plus pp. 15-19.
- Susan Perry and Jim Dawson, “Timeline,” Nightmare: Women and the Dalkon Shield (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1985); 242-249.
- Agnes Arnold-Forster, Rita Maria Conry, and Gemma Duncan. The UTI Documentary. 2021.
We are thrilled to have Agnes Arnold-Forster, Rita Conry, Carol Williams, and Erin Spinney join us this week to discuss how historians can use their own healthcare experiences to complement and inform their research and advocacy work.
PDFs of all readings can be accessed via this session's downloadable ZIP file (below).