8 October 2024

Interview with Natacha Klein Käfer about researching health and privacy from a historical perspective

Assistant Professor Natacha Klein Käfer is leading the HEALTH theme at the Centre for Privacy Studies, and she is a board member of the University of Copenhagen School of Global Health.

In this interview from the School of Global Health, Natacha Klein Käfer shares her experience in researching health and privacy from a historical perspective, bringing history closer to our current global health debates.

Find the full interview here.

Natacha is investigating how privacy shaped what we understand as health. The HEALTH theme investigates this question through an examination of how people dealt with illnesses and different forms of healing from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Following the entanglements of privacy with history of science and knowledge, the theme will focus on how strategies of privacy intertwined with the pursuit of knowledge and how the search for healing knowledge also demanded the infringement upon the privacy of others. We are particularly interested in the impact of colonialism on how health was defined, promoted, and restored. As such, the theme intersects also with colonial and maritime history. Moreover, the HEALTH theme deals with privacy negotiated at the thresholds between human and non-human animals and diverse ecosystems. In general, the theme focuses on historical agents that are action subjects in the production of healing knowledge, but also those that were subjected to these knowledge pursuits, particularly in regard to what role privacy played in enabling or disabling their agency. The team also aims to incorporate – but also question – methods of computational history to understand the complex relationship between privacy and health in a long-term perspective.

Find information about the HEALTH Theme here.

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