Date: 29 March 2023
Time: 12:15 (Malta time)
Venue: MKS414, Level 4, MAKS Building
Speaker: Dr Marc Kosciejew, Senior Lecturer of Library, Information and Archive Sciences at the University of Malta
A Documentary History of the Immunity (or Vaccine) Passport: Health Certificates of Public Health, Identity and Power from the Plague to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Abstract
The immunity (or vaccine) passport of the coronavirus pandemic, as a concept and object, is not unprecedented. This health and identity document features a long history spanning over half-a-millennium and appearing across diverse geopolitical and sociocultural contexts. This presentation offers a documentary history of the immunity passport and its heterogeneous material instantiations, uses, and effects across divergent historical settings. It illuminates how the immunity passport has helped shape identities and public health, as well as impacted individual and institutional agency, during health crises.
Four historical cases are presented, specifically the plagues ravaging the Renaissance Mediterranean region, the 1665 Great Plague of London, the yellow fever outbreaks in the antebellum slave-era southern USA, and the chronic cholera conditions confronting colonial-era British India. Although disparate, these historical cases share the immunity passport as a non-pharmaceutical intervention into their respective health crises that played important roles in people’s lives during these troubled times.
Programme:
- 12:15 - A Documentary History of the Immunity (or Vaccine) Passport: Health Certificates of Public Health, Identity and Power from the Plague to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Speaker: Dr Marc Kosciejew
Hosted by: Department of Library Information & Archive Sciences, MaKS
- 13:00 - Q & A session/informal discussion
Admission is free, but kindly reserve a place by sending an email.
Speaker’s Profile
Dr Marc Kosciejew is a Senior Lecturer of Library, Information and Archive Sciences at the University of Malta. Dr. Kosciejew received his PhD in Library and Information Science (LIS) from Western University in London, Canada. He also holds a Master of Library and Information Science from Western University; an Honours Bachelor of Arts and various LIS certificates from the University of Toronto; and a Higher Education Teaching certificate from Harvard University. He is the author of over eighty academic articles, book reviews, and newspaper articles.
His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in leading scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Documentation, The Library Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Media History, Tate Papers, and Performance Philosophy. Dr. Kosciejew also serves as the Associate Editor, Book Reviews for the Journal of the Association of Information Science and Technology (JASIST), a top-ranking global LIS journal. Further, his pioneering research on North Korean libraries represents some of the first English-language publications on this subject.
