MEDEP Seminars

16 September 2025

10:00 CET

Framing a Cure: Science, Gender, and Media in the Making of the Polidin Vaccine in Romania, 1960s-2000s

by Irina Nastasă-Matei (Political Science Department, University of Bucharest)

6 May 2025

10:00 CET

The mediated practices and narratives of care. Artists and activists under lockdown.

by Magdalena Zdrodowska (Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University)

11 March 2025

10:00 CET

Health, Ideology, Media. Polish Medical Assistance to North Korea in the 1950s.

by Sławomir Łotysz (Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences)

22 November 2024

15:00 GMT

Media shaping epidemic – body shaping media. The case of HIV/AIDS in Polish sign language media.

by Magdalena Dunaj (University of Warsaw)

Abstract

How socioeconomic marginalization of deaf people has shaped access to media and communication technologies during the epidemic outbreak? The cliché answer is that deaf people have restricted access to information. But what does it mean? Do not deaf people have cell phones with internet access? Of course, they do. The issue here is not the medium but the language subjected to mediatization.

In creating individual meanings, the media plays a similar role to the language. But one has to remember that different languages are subject to mediatization to varying degrees. Sign communication did not have its writing revolution, print revolution, or telecommunications revolution. Sign communication resisted mediatization until the spread of the Internet. The Internet is a space of communication that embeds different media. For deaf people and sign languages, video plays a key role.

Mediatization of sign language in Poland has been developing over the past 15 years. For this reason, sign language media could not react to the outbreak of AIDS/HIV epidemy in Poland, although AIDS/HIV is present in Polish sign language media. I wonder, however, if AIDS/HIV is considered an epidemic in Polish sign language media. It is clear for mainstream media and shared (hearing) memory, but is a different media image of AIDS and HIV possible? In this presentation, I will focus on features of sign language grammar and related ways of conceptualizing reality that can bring us closer to answering this question.

Registration by 20 November at medepchanse@gmail.com