by Kate Errington, Birkbeck University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Dr Catherine Medici-Thiemann, University of Nebraska Medical Center; Dr Erin Spinney, University of New Brunswick; Dr Magda(lena) Szarota, Lancaster University; Emma Wathen, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
On the 15-16 July 2024, 15 delegates travelled to the University of Edinburgh for the Reproductive Health Histories Working Group Hybrid Meeting, organised by Jennifer Fraser (King’s College London), Karissa Patton (University of Edinburgh), Whitney Wood (Vancouver Island University) and Agnes Arnold Forster (University of Edinburgh). Supported by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), the Reproductive Health Histories Working Group is a collective of scholars who come together each month to think about how present-day issues and personal experiences influence our work in reproductive health history. This hybrid meeting – the final working group of the 23/24 academic year – focused on ‘Histories of the Personal’ and laid plans for our second year of operation. This event was made possible with the support from the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the University of Edinburgh, Vancouver Island University, and the CHSTM.
The two-day event began with a guided tour of the exhibition Women in Revolt at the National Galleries of Scotland Modern 2. The exhibition celebrated art and activism in the United Kingdom, 1970–1990, and explored ‘themes and issues, such as the Women’s Liberation Movement, maternal and domestic experiences, Punk and independent music, Greenham Common and the peace movement, the visibility of black and South Asian women artists, Section 28 and the AIDS epidemic’ as well as the disabled women’s organising (National Galleries of Scotland, 2024). This exhibition offered a thoughtful introduction to the working group proceedings, with archives and artwork that were highly pertinent to our overlapping research interests.
Following the exhibition, we travelled to the University of Edinburgh to begin our working group discussions in earnest. We began with a private screening of The UTI Documentary with commentary from Agnes Arnold Forster and filmmaker Rita Conry. Having both lived with chronic and recurrent UTIs, Arnold Forster and Conry talked about their desire to ‘reveal the debilitating nature of UTIs, shine a light on the current outdated testing and treatment guidelines, and challenge the tendency of healthcare to see women as unreliable witnesses to their own bodies’ (The UTI Documentary, n.d.). This screening was followed by another short documentary by Arnold Forster and Conry – a work in progress about birth control entitled High, Soft and Open.
We were then joined online by working group members who could not attend in-person, to discuss goals for the second year of the working group. Our collective knowledge as scholars from a variety of institutions, fields, and career stages and inter-generational perspectives offers exciting opportunities for future public engagement, pedagogy discussions and mentorship which we plan to investigate. Following a short comfort break, we reconvened for an intimate discussion about pre-circulated readings on histories of the personal. Carol Williams (University of Lethbridge) and Erin Spinney (University of New Brunswick) led discussions on the topics of the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device and endometriosis, respectively. We reflected on our anxiety about injecting our health and experiences into the histories we tell, both in our research and in the classroom. Williams’ and Spinney’s presentations helped us articulate the value in pursuing these histories of the personal, whether through helping students situate their own health experiences in historical narratives or making connections to contemporary approaches to reproductive activism.
We also discussed how disability studies perspectives can enrich these topics, specifically regarding the still-prevalent positivist approaches in many academic institutional settings. These approaches can enhance the false dichotomy between objective and subjective knowledge-making, privileging the former. Conversely, as our discussions have shown, the personal is not only political but also an epistemically and academically valid and timely way of creating knowledge. We also addressed the personal costs related to such approaches and knowledge-making, including the burnout that academics engaged in this research, as well as evidence-based advocacy, can experience, regardless of whether the topic concerns countries at ‘peace’ or war-related contexts, such as Ukraine under Russian invasion.
Minds buzzing with ideas, we capped off the day with haggis and banoffee pie!
The following morning, we resumed discussions about our future goals for the working group, before members travelled to the SSHM Conference in Glasgow. As we embark on our second year, we are sharing our works in progress and identifying intersections in our research. Our aim is to forge further collaborations, facilitate in-depth discussions on topics within the reproductive health histories arena, and to collectively publish our work.
If you are interested in joining the Reproductive Health Histories Working Group, you can read more and sign up online: https://www.chstm.org/content/reproductive-health-histories-0