CONFERENCES
& DEBATES

Eleanor Davey, historian of ideas and humanitarianism, senior lecturer at the Humanitarian and Conflict Research Institute, University of Manchester, discusses her book, Idealism Beyond Borders. The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954-1988, devoted to the intellectual history of sans-frontiérisme and Third-Worldism, in France, from the Algerian war to the early years of Médecins Sans Frontières.

Theaters of war, genocide, mass crimes, Syria, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo are at the heart of the international symposium organized by the platform L’humanitaire dans la globalisation of the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH) and the Centre de Réflexion sur l'Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires (CRASH) of Médecins Sans Frontières. This symposium is part of the commemoration by these two institutions of the 25 years of the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis.

The CRASH team invited you to the screening-debate “France in Rwanda. Guilty neutrality” on Monday 11th of February 2019 from 6 to 8pm, in the 1rst floor room of the 8 rue Saint-Sabin. A documentary film by Robert Genoud and Claudine Vidal (Director Emeritus for research at the CNRS, member of the CRASH scientific committee at MSF), and produced by EUP. Before and after the screening, Claudine Vidal and Jean-Hervé Bradol, both actors of MSF mobilization between 1994 and 1998 launched the discussion.

The CRASH team invited you to the debate-conference “Healing foreigners in France: The State and the civil society organisations from the 80s to the 90s” on Monday 17th of December 2018 from 6 to 8pm, in the 1rst floor room at the 8 rue Saint-Sabin. We hosted Caroline Izambert, who recently defended, at the EHESS, her PhD thesis focusing on the foreigners’ access to healthcare in France. Her title: “Heal foreigners?” The State and the civil society organisations for the health coverage of the poor and foreigners in France from the 1980s to the present day. 

Conference/debate with Benjamin Boudou, political scientist and researcher at the Max Planck institute.

Who profits from vaccination? Individuals? Society? Companies? Is vaccination efficient? Is it dangerous? Profitable? What are the factors influencing public opinion in this domain? Lise Barnéoud, science journalist and author of Immunisés ? Un nouveau regard sur les vaccins, has engaged in an investigation revealing multiple - and sometimes contradictory - realities observed in the French vaccination sector. She has carried out her investigation from three distinct viewpoints: the one of a mother who needs to decide whether to vaccinate her children or not; of a journalist leading an enquiry; and of a scientist analyzing how facts are built.   
 
Lise Barnéoud was a Crash guest speaker at a conference on vaccination held on December 5, 2017. A discussion with Epicentre, Crash and the MSF Medical Department allowed us to exchange views on vaccinal policy, which remains a cornerstone of MSF operations and a recurring subject of discussion and controversy.

Sharon Abramowitz is an anthropologist and a visiting researcher at the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, co-editor of recently published Medical humanitarianism. Ethnographies of practice. She has devoted much of her work to responding to epidemics - most recently in Ebola, and in West Africa, Liberia in particular.

During the conference organized by MSF-Crash on 23 October 2017, she discussed the contribution of medical anthropology to humanitarian action as well as her latest book and most recent projects.

Eyal Weizman, the founder of « Forensic Architecture » at the Goldsmiths College (University of London) came to present the project as well as a number of his works at a MSF - Crash conference organised at MSF.

The polio eradication campaign has indeniably and remarkably succeeded in tumbling down the number of polio cases worldwide. But difficulties currently faced by the Programme -pockets of social resistance in several countries, reinfection of some countries, outbreak of epidemics associated with strains of vaccine-derived polio viruses- indeed challenge one of the main assumptions underlying the objective of the eradication itself : the full compliance of an entire population to a public health program.

People wandering through the rubble in Haiti, arms outstretched begging for help amid the floods in Pakistan: the media coverage of disasters invariably features helpless victims, overwhelmed by the disaster, waiting to be helped...

The emergency and constraints of certain catastrophes force MSF teams to medical and operational audacity. To take new paths or stray away from official protocols is to run the risk of doing things less well, of perhaps doing harm and dilapidating resources...

In 1998 MSF decided to support the creation of the International Criminal Court. 10 years later MSF stated that it ‘would not cooperate and would not transmit any information to the ICC'. How can we explain this change of position?