Speaker: Professor Maebh Long, Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Otago
Panelists:
Ann Kelly (Anthropology)
Rachel Hindmarsh (Medieval and Modern Languages )
Sally Frampton (History/Uehiro)
This talk offers a sociopolitical perspective to histories of immunology by tracing early discourses of immunity as they circulated beyond scientific developments and into public culture. Drawing on newspaper advertisements from Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I identify earlier conceptualizations of immunity within interconnected colonial and cultural contexts shaped by the British Empire and outline how immunitary logics of individualism, protection, risk management, labour, and power were formed within marketing media. Advertisements framed immunity as a purchasable and personal asset, offering security against modern anxieties such as disease, environmental instability, social uncertainty, and the loss of power. Foregrounding immunity as an individual responsibility and commercial ideal, these narratives emphasized isolation and defence rather than interdependence, embedding conservative immunitary logics that prioritized the individual over the group, sought to retain power, and presented the nonhuman as threat.
