PSU lecture to explore roots of anti-vaccine sentiments

PLYMOUTH — The Plymouth State University Saul O Sidore Lecture Series, focused this year on understanding and responding to social disruptions, will present “Before Anti-Autism: Cow Mania and the Vaccination Debates” on Friday, Sept. 24, at 7 p.m., featuring Travis Chi Wing Lau, Ph.D.

Dr. Lau will make the case that much of the current anti-vaccination discourse draws its rhetoric and affective strategies from long-standing ableist anxieties surrounding “cow mania,” a condition associated with the violation of species boundaries and class tensions. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was heavy outcry in Britain over Edward Jenner’s campaigns to nationalize vaccination. Opponents of the vaccination, like Benjamin Moseley and William Rowley, decried it as a violent, dangerous procedure that corrupts mankind, especially children, by reducing them to a bovine state.

The Saul O Sidore Lecture Series is free and open to the public and will take place in the Smith Recital Hall, reception room 130, and virtually via Zoom at go.plymouth.edu/sidore.

There will be an opportunity for questions following the lecture.

For more information visit: https://campus.plymouth.edu/sidore/.