Cancer Culture: A humanities approach (Part 2)
Monday Lunch Live
23 Sep 2024
The second of a two-part series, this webinar explores what a humanities approach can bring to better understanding the myths, messages and medical knowledge in Australian cancer control. Speakers will discuss how scientific advancements have shaped anti-cancer campaigns, Big Tobacco, as well as smoking and sun tanning in Australian culture.
How do we change culture to improve public health?
This is the first of two sessions bringing together researchers from the “Cancer Culture” project led by the University of Melbourne and Cancer Council Victoria, funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, with collaborators from Deakin and Flinders Universities.
The project as a whole seeks to analyse the deployment of anti-cancer campaigns, the socio-cultural and political context that allowed them to leverage policy change, and their connection to life-saving behaviours. Distilling elements of success and failure will better inform advocates and governments in preventing cancer and other diseases through future health promotion. Topics covered in this webinar include:
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How scientific advancements shaped anti-cancer campaigns
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Ciggie mate? Smoking and Australian culture
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A sunburnt country: Skin cancer and national culture
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Big Tobacco and Cancer Council Victoria - The creative dialogue
Speakers
Ann Westmore AM
Senior Research Associate at the University of Melbourne
A science-trained expert in the history of medicine, Ann has with decades of experience and connections to the national and international medical community. She ran CCV’s Witness to the History of Australian Medicine Seminars in which participants in major cancer control campaigns offered their insights on the strategies and trials associated with them and she wrote the one limited history of CCV (Westmore, 2005).
Prof Andrew J. May
Social Historian and Professor of Australian History, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, the University of Melbourne
Prof Andrew J. May is a social historian and Professor of Australian History in the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne where he has been a Faculty member since 2000. He has published widely on the social experience of the Australian city, including Melbourne Street Life (1998), Espresso! Melbourne Coffee Stories (2001), Federation Square (2003, with Norman Day), and as principal editor of The Encyclopedia of Melbourne (2005).
As facilitator of the Melbourne History Workshop, he oversees a studio-based research collaboratory in the History Program which taps the pooled expertise of staff, research higher degree students and affiliates in order to provide innovative and rigorously-applied historical research, postgraduate training, industry collaboration and community-facing projects. He has further interest in aspects of colonialism in India, his key contribution to the scholarship being Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-East India (2012).
Dr Richie Barker
Advertising and Promotional Cultures Scholar, Deakin University
Dr Richie Barker is an advertising and promotional cultures scholar at Deakin University who examines the production of advertising and integrated brand communication with a focus on practitioners as cultural intermediaries and the sociocultural shaping of their creative processes. He was formerly an advertising and digital media copywriter. His background as a researcher and practitioner contributes to the project’s aims by supporting a comprehensive examination of advertising in the conceptualisation and deployment of anti-cancer campaigns.
Anthony Jenkins
PhD Candidate, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, the University of Melbourne
Course Details
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