Re-use for better health
Time and place to be announced.
Sławomir Łotysz has been a professor at the Institute of the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences since 2014. He was an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar in 2014-15, and a Charles Price Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia in 2007-08. He was President of the International Committee for the History of Technology in 2017-21, and is currently a member of the SHOT Nominating Committee for 2022-24.
Sławomir’s research interests include the history of public health and environmental history. He has recently published two monographs, Factories as Aid. Penicillin behind the Iron Curtain, 1945-54 (in Polish: Fabryka z darów. Penicylina za żelazną kurtyną 1945-1954). Warsaw 2020 and Pripet Marshes. Nature, Knowledge and Politics in Polish Polonia until 1945 (in Polish: Pińskie błota. Natura, wiedza i polityka na polskim Polesiu do 1945 roku). Krakow: Universitas 2022. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the project Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Science Communication and Public Health in the 20th and 21st Centuries, funded by the CHANSE network – Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe.
Abstract
Re-use, repair and maintenance can be described as fundamental to the relationship between humans and technology. They characterize those types of interventions through which material products of technology are given new uses, restored to former functionality or kept in good working order. Re-use can also apply to technology itself, understood as a manufacturing process or technical knowledge. All of these activities play an important role in our quest for better health. In his lecture, Slawomir Lotysz will draw on cases from different regions and time periods to unravel the intertwined relationships between health, technology and policy that lead to and result from the re-use of technology, either as material objects or immaterial ideas, for better health.
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