Conis, Elena. "A Social History of Vaccination." Against the Grain (October 23, 2017) ["It’s stating the obvious to observe that vaccination in the United States is a highly charged subject. But the heat of the controversies, as historian Elena Conis argues, obscures how vaccination — which has saved many lives when used against deadly illnesses — became so widespread, including for milder diseases. Conis discusses the cultural, political, and social forces that have shaped mass vaccination."]
Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Lady Vanishes." Revisionist History 1.1 (ND) ["In the late 19th, a painting by a virtually unknown artist took England by storm: The Roll Call but after that brilliant first effort, the artist all but disappeared. Why?
The Lady Vanishes explores the world of art and politics to examines the strange phenomenon of the “token”—the outsider whose success serves not to alleviate discrimination but perpetuate it. If a country elects a female president, does that mean the door is now open for all women to follow? Or does that simply give the status quo the justification to close the door again?"]
---. "Saigon, 1965." Revisionist History 1.2 (ND) ["In the early 1960s, the Pentagon set up a top-secret research project in an old villa in downtown Saigon. The task? To interview captured North Vietnamese soldiers and guerrillas in order to measure their morale: Was the relentless U.S. bombing pushing them to the brink of capitulation? Saigon, 1965 is the story of three people who got caught up in that effort: a young Vietnamese woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and a brilliant Russian émigré. All saw the same things. All reached different conclusions. The Pentagon effort, run by the Rand Corporation, was one of the most ambitious studies of enemy combatants ever conducted—and no one could agree on what it meant."]
Hacking, Ian and Andrew Pickering. "How To Think About Science (Part 4)." Ideas (February 11, 2015) ["Philosophers of science tended, until quite recently, to treat science as a mainly theoretical activity. Experiment - science's actual, often messy encounter with the world - was viewed as something secondary, a mere hand-servant to theory. Popular understanding followed suit. Theories were what counted: one spoke of the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, the Copernican theory and so on. It was as thinkers and seers that the great scientists were lionized and glorified. But this attitude has recently begun to change. A new generation of historians and philosophers have made the practical, inventive side of science their focus. They've pointed out that science doesn't just think about the world, it makes the world and then remakes it. Science, for them, really is what the thinkers of the 17th century first called it: experimental philosophy. In this episode we hear from two of the scholars who've been influential in advancing this changed view: first Ian Hacking, widely regarded as Canada's pre-eminent philosopher of science, and later in the hour Andrew Pickering, author of The Mangle of Practice. "]
Miron, Jeffrey and Annie Rouse. "Harry Anslinger - America's First Drug Czar." Anslinger: The Untold Cannabis Conspiracy 1.1 (February 5, 2018) ["On the first episode 1 of Anslinger: The untold cannabis conspiracy, we discuss narcotic policies and the life of Harry Anslinger, America’s first Drug Czar, prior to his appointment as Chief and First Commissioner to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. We also interview Harvard economist, Dr. Jeffrey Miron, about the global outlook on drugs, diseases and the economy during the early 1900s."]
"Songs for My Dear-Wolf." Dialogic Cinephilia (June 14, 2018)
The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins (Canada: Geoff Bowie, 2001: 76 mins) ["This feature documentary is a portrait of Peter Watkins, an Oscar®-winning British filmmaker who, for the past 4 decades, has proved that films can be made without compromise. With the proliferation of TV channels, documentaries are enjoying an unprecedented boom fuelled by audiences seeking an alternative to infotainment. But now documentary filmmaking, too, finds itself constrained by the imperatives of television. However, there is a rebel resisting this uniformity of the spirit. Pre-eminent among today's documentary filmmakers concerned about this mind-numbing standardization, Peter Watkins has never strayed from either his principles or the cause."]
Watkins, Peter. "Notes on the Media Crisis." MACBA (2010) ["Peter Watkins (Norbiton, United Kingdom, 1935) gained critical recognition in the sixties as a result of the scandal arising from the BBC’s boycott against his film The War Game. Nevertheless, although he continued to produce a series of essential, radical works that did not fit within conventional film or adhere to the timing standards of mainstream cinema, his films where no longer mentioned or taken into account as key works in debates on political commitment and the cinematic image. Peter Watkins’s last work, La commune (1999) represents, among many other things, a curious rereading of the relationship between film and the discourses of history, by means of the rupture of the illusion of representation through the blurring of the boundary that usually separates actors from the characters they play. In Spring 2010, the MACBA presented a retrospective on Peter Watkins, which reviews his contribution to contemporary film and, in particular, his status as a pioneer of docudrama and false documentary."]
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