2015-2021

This project is a collaboration with Dr. Johan Holst, Senior Scientist at Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations CEPI, Oslo, Norway.

The research ‘Vaccine Hesitancy’ explores the health beliefs of vaccine critical parents. The inquiry reveals several underlying beliefs that influence the parents’ decision-making in either selecting, delaying or refusing vaccines for their children. Decisions relate to their understanding of the immune system and importance of illness in a child’s development, as well as their definitions of ‘natural’.

The artist-researcher conducted nine ethnographic audio-recorded interviews with vaccine-hesitant parents at their homes in the Netherlands and Finland. Parents were invited to donate anonymous home video footage of their children for inclusion in a film. She subsequently analysed the interviews and visualized the parents’ most dominant health beliefs in diagrammatic prints. By utilizing these prints, the parents’ health beliefs were discussed with vaccine researcher Johan Holst from Norwegian Institute of Public Health. These discussions were also recorded and integrated into the film Conversations with Vaccine-Critical Parents (2017). The intention was to stimulate polyphony instead of promoting a single viewpoint, and to illustrate the distances between the parents and the voice of science.

The output was launched by pilot-testing the film in medical education at the Tampere University in 2016. The film was also screened at several epidemiology trainings including the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training by the Swedish Public Health Agency and NHS Scotland. The group exhibition <Immune Nations> was exhibited at the United Nations in Geneva during the 2017 World Health Assembly.

This study is part of Kaisu’s Academy Research Fellow project Video Scenarios in Medical Education: Polyphony and Non-linearity in Audiovisual Doctor–Patient Narratives, funded by the Academy of Finland 2015–2020, and co-funded by Tampere University. This work was completed as part of the International Collaboration for Capitalizing on Cost-Effective and Life-Saving Commodities (i4C) that is funded through the Research Council of Norway’s Global Health & Vaccination Program (GLOBVAC Project #234608).