© R. & S. Łotysz
MEDEP: Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Science Communication and Public Health in the 20th and 21st Centuries

What is the relationship between technologies of communication and social and cultural change? This collaborative project between humanities researchers and art practitioners proposes to explore this question in the context of public health and illness. More specifically, it seeks to document, from historical and contemporary as well as trans-disciplinary and trans-regional perspectives, the role of media and technologies of communication in the making and management of epidemic outbreaks in Poland, Romania, the UK and India since the mid-twentieth century. Through its strong public outreach component, the project also aims to devise innovative educational tools that help to restore the memory of past pandemics to public consciousness and promote critical thinking about the intersections of public health, media and technology in the Digital Age.

The project employs an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on a combination of historical and literary approaches, including formulating the conceptual and theoretical framework and collecting and analyzing archival, printed and oral evidence in Poland, Romania, Hungary, India, the UK, Switzerland and the US. Moving beyond the ‘effect’ tradition of media research, it investigates the manner in which different groups of social actors have incorporated media and technology into communicative practices around epidemic outbreaks, in order to understand the form and content of the public health debates and communications thus mediated and locate these developments within a longer history of technological and medical innovation. We focus on five groups of social actors, some of whom have been central to epidemic responses, while others have found themselves at their periphery: 1) governments, 2) scientists, healthcare professionals and health activists, 3) media institutions and practitioners, 4) persons with disabilities, and) minorities, e.g. the Roma people and South Asian migrants. The project outcomes will be of interest to both academic and non-academic audiences, including historians, scholars from across the medical humanities, journalists, media and medical professionals, artists, vulnerable social groups, educators, students and parents.

KEYWORDS:

media, technology, public health, epidemics, science communication, history, literature, arts

CONSORTIUM

  • Project Leader: Sławomir Łotysz, Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, History of Technology Research Unit, Poland, e-mail
    Amelia Bonea, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Germany (in the role of Project Leader from November 2022-January 2023)
  • Melissa Dickson, University of Birmingham, Literature, United Kingdom
  • Irina Nastasă-Matei, University of Bucharest, Faculty of Political Science, Romania, e-mail

COOPERATION PARTERS

  • Kai Tuchmann & Anuja Ghosalkar, Academy for Theatre and Digitality (Theater Dortmund) & Drama Queen
  • Teatr 21, Performing artists
  • Fragile Society, Performing artists
  • Gareth Dickson, University of Oxford Department of Continuing Education

EFFECTS & ACHIEVEMENTS

Project website

Project achievements:

Throughout the project, our aim was to understand the complexity of the relationship between epidemics and media broadly understood. All three teams explored how epidemics are shaped not only by biology, but also by communication, the media, and culture. To see how the media helped frame public understanding of disease and being sick we analysed newspapers, literature, medical reports, popular periodicals, educational brochures, documentary films, radio broadcasts and archival documents. We also conducted oral history interviews.

Leveraging the diverse interests, experiences and cultural backgrounds of our Polish-Romanian-British consortium, we adopted various perspectives and approaches to these issues. The UK team focused particularly on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘Russian Flu’ pandemic. The Romanian team investigated the role of mass media and communication technologies in epidemic management in communist Romania, paying special attention to the roles of women and marginalised communities in public health campaigns. The Polish team studied the politicisation of medical discourse in Polish media during the Korean War in the 1950s, as well as the persistence of misinformation during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Our research shows that debates about misinformation, alternative medicine, public anxiety and trust in expertise are not new; they have deep historical roots and affect everyone, regardless of political setting. Another area of consideration, particularly for the Polish team, was the use of different communication technologies to convey health-related information. These analyses covered postage stamps, radio, the performing arts, vlogs, and podcasts. As the latter two were primarily used by deaf and blind people, respectively, to inform their communities about the AIDS and COVD-19 pandemics, the analysis portrayed their use as examples of grassroots activism.

We have shared our findings with both academic and wider audiences through a jointly authored book, a special issue, journal articles, conference presentations, creative workshops, theatrical performances and public readings. We have also collaborated internationally across the fields of history, literature, the performing arts and medical humanities. In doing so, we have demonstrated how the humanities can illuminate contemporary debates about health and illness and the ways in which these issues are communicated across political and societal divides. By contextualising present-day public health challenges within a longer cultural history, the project contributes to more informed, historically grounded public discussions about health, the media, and society.

Publications:

  • Zdrodowska, M., Horizontal Aesthetics and Bed Activism: Pandemic Subversive Horizontality, Didaskalia, Gazeta Teatralna, English Issue 2024, https://didaskalia.pl/en/article/horizontal-aesthetics-and-bed-activism-pandemic-subversive-horizontality
  • Vincent, E., Hauntings in the Nursery: Reviving the Nursemaid Through Fin-de-Siècle Gothic, CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures, Vol. 2, no. 1 (2024): 51-79, https://doi.org/10.1353/cusp.2024.a920145
  • Dickson, M., The Vampire We Need: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Victorian Science of the Mind, Teaching Science Writing, 2024
  • Łotysz, S., The Fear of AIDS in Late Socialist Poland, Balkanistic Worlds, Balkanistic Forum – International University Seminar for Studies and Specialization, Issue 3, 2025, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17116565, https://zenodo.org/records/17116565
  • Łotysz, S., Zdrodowska, M., Znaczki pocztowe w komunikowaniu zdrowia: polio, ikonografia medyczna i niepełnosprawność (Postage Stamps in Health Communication: Polio, Medical Iconography, and Disability), Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki, Instytut Historii Nauki im. L. i A. Birkenmajerów PAN, Vol. 70(4), 2025, https://doi.org/10.4467/0023589XKHNT.25.001.22780
  • Zdrodowska, M., Horizontal Aesthetics and Bed Activism: Pandemic Subversive Horizontality, Didaskalia. Gazeta Teatralna, Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego we Wrocławiu, English Issue, 2024, https://doi.org/10.34762/af1t-kg66, https://didaskalia.pl/en/article/horizontal-aesthetics-and-bed-activism-pandemic-subversive-horizontality
  • Łotysz, S., “Auditory Billboard.” Communicating Health Awareness through the Radio in 1920–1930s America, Journal of the Medical Library Association, Pitt Open Library Publishing, 2025
  • Łotysz, S., Zdrodowska, M., The Iconography and Symbolics of AIDS Postage Stamps in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe until 2011, Centaurus. Journal of the European Society for the History of Science, Brepols / European Society for the History of Science, Vol. 68(1), 2026, https://www.brepols.net/series/CNT
  • Matei, I., Zdrodowska, M., Media and Epidemics in Eastern Europe. An Introduction, Centaurus. Journal of the European Society for the History of Science, Brepols / European Society for the History of Science, Vol. 68(1), 2026https://www.brepols.net/series/CNT
  • Łotysz, S., Matei, I., Zdrodowska, M. (eds.), Media and Epidemics in Eastern Europe, Centaurus. Journal of the European Society for the History of Science, Brepols / European Society for the History of Science, Vol. 68(1), 2026, https://www.brepols.net/series/CNT
  • Bosomitu, S.-I., Ideology vs. Scientific Authority in Communist Romania: The Management of Information and Mass Communication during Epidemic Outbreaks, Centaurus. Journal of the European Society for the History of Science, Brepols / European Society for the History of Science, 2026, https://www.brepols.net/series/CNT
  • Dunaj, M., Accessibility as Practice, Not Provision: Insights from Polish Sign Language Vlogs During COVID 19, Disability & Society, Taylor & Francis, 2026
  • Zdrodowska, M., Dunaj, M., Dinu R. H., Kołodziejczak A., Accessing and Narrating d/Deaf Heritage in Eastern Europe, in: “Disability Heritage: Participatory and Transformative Engagement? (Key Issues in Heritage Studies)”, Routledge, 2026
  • Lotysz, S., “This Stamp Is Immoral”. A Microhistory of Standing up against the Anti-AIDS Campaign in Switzerland in the Mid-1990s, European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health, Brill, 2026
  • Matei, I., Transnational Epidemics, National Cure: The Mass Media in Socialist Romania on the Polidin Vaccine, Centaurus. Journal of the European Society for the History of Science, Brepols / European Society for the History of Science, Vol. 68(1), 2026, https://www.brepols.net/series/CNT
  • Dickson, M., Vincent, E., A British Literary Contagion: ‘Russian Flu’ and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siecle, University of Manchester Press, 2026
  • Dickson, M., Vincent, E., Introduction: Media and Epidemics at the Fin-de-Siecle, Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research, Taylor and Francis, Vol. 2, 2026, https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ranr20
  • Dickson, M., Vincent, E., Media and Epidemics at the Fin-de-Siecle, Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research, Taylor and Francis, Vol. 2, 2026, https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ranr20
  • Dickson, M., Vincent, E., Media and Epidemics Conference Report, H-Soz-Kult, Berlin, 2024, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-145642
  • Dickson, M., The Vampire We Need: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Victorian Science of the Mind, Teaching Science Writing, Modern Language Association, New York, 2026
  • Vincent, E., Resolving “Collective Amnesia”: Uncovering Disease Outbreaks Past to Shape Pandemic Futures, Medical Humanities, Springer Nature, 2026
  • Vincent, E., “There Is No Death”: Familial Love, Loss, and (Re)connection in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualist Literature, Where Love Happens: The Changing Social Practices of Love in the Long Nineteenth Century, Peter Lang, 2025, https://doi.org/10.3726/b21993
  • Albin, K., Between Adapting to Crisis and Constructing Expectations of Positive Change: The COVID-19 Pandemic in the Information Messages of Blind Podcasters in Poland, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, Stockholm University Press, 2026
  • Vincent, E., “[He] Treated Me Magnetically”: Influenza and Alternative Healing in Fin-de-Siècle Spiritualism Periodicals, Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research, Taylor & Francis, Vol. 1, 2026
  • Lipko-Konieczna, J., Troska w procesie. Jak możemy zmieniać instytucje, Didaskalia. Gazeta Teatralna, Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego we Wrocławiu, 2026
  • Łotysz, S., Was ‘World United Against Malaria’ in 1962? A Global Campaign to Promote Health through Philately That Failed, História, Ciências, Saúde: Manguinhos, 2026
  • Kiwerska-Sobolewska, Z., Can the Subaltern Sign? A Case Study of Akademia Głuchych Foundation and Deaf Mental Health Grassroots Empowerment in Poland after COVID-19, International Journal of Communication, University of Southern California, 2026

 Start date

1 November 2022

Project duration

36 months

 Project budget

€ 1 418 897

Funding organisations