Roundtable: Birth Control and Sex Education in Cultural and Historical Perspectives

Description

Speakers

Jessica Borge (Visiting Fellow in Digital Humanities, School of Advanced Study; Digital Collections/ Scholarship Manager, Kings College London Archives & Research Collections)

Lea Taragin-Zeller (Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute, University of Cambridge and Technion: Israel Institute of Technology)

Ben Kasstan (Research Fellow, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Vice Chancellor's Research Fellow, University of Bristol)
 

Abstracts

Dr Jessica Borge
'It should have been a Bonanza': AIDS, Photo Processing, and the Fall of the British-Made Condom 

The concept of agency in health and medicine often speaks to the patient experience of medical procedures, products and services. But behind these lie other agents, such as local communities of factory workers, who are also affected by the success or failure of medical products and, further, the solvency of companies that bankroll them. Drawing from her new book on the London Rubber Company, and using the specific case study of condom manufacturing during the AIDS crisis, Jessica Borge describes the final days of the Chingford (North London) factory that made market-leading Durex, and the perplexity of helpless shop floor staff who watched their jobs evaporate despite unprecedented demand for condoms, following a string of bad corporate investments.

Book: Protective Practices: A History of the London Rubber Company and the Condom Business, is published by McGill-Queens University Press. For more information, see www.londonrubbercompany.com

Dr Lea Taragin-Zeller and Dr Ben Kasstan
'I didn’t know how to be with my husband': State-Religion Struggles over Sex Education in Israel and England

Sex education presents a major dilemma for state-minority relations, reflecting a conflict between basic rights to education and religious freedom. In this comparative ethnography of informal sex education among ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews in Israel and England, we frame the critical difference between ‘age’-appropriate and ‘life-stage’ (marriage and childbirth) models of sex education. Conceptualising these competing approaches as disputes over ‘knowledge responsibility,’ we call for more context-specific understandings of how educational responsibilities are envisioned in increasingly diverse populations.

An event organised by Health, Medicine and Agency Research Network
Administrative assistance: networks@crassh.cam.ac.uk

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