Who are you?
Hello! I’m an undergraduate linguistics student going into my third year and I’ve been working as a SPRINT intern on the Quo VaDis team throughout July.
What is SPRINT?
SPRINT (Summer Project Research INTernship) is a four week internship available to students majoring in Linguistics and/or English Language at Lancaster University. It has been an incredible opportunity to learn more about what it’s like to work in a research team and be involved with interesting, cutting-edge research.
What have you been looking at?
Anti-vaccination sentiment is not new! Whilst I’ve been here, I’ve been investigating anti-vaccination movements throughout history. As can be seen from the interactive timeline below, I’ve detailed events ranging from pamphlet to policy, to a demonstration in 1885 involving a decapitated Jenner effigy and over 80,000 protestors! Besides providing extensive historical context to anti-vaccination, I’ve been sourcing over 50 documents from that period and learnt corpus techniques from the world’s leading corpus linguistic department to analyse them.
What has it been like working with the research team during COVID?
Whilst it would have been nice to meet the team in person, it has been lovely to meet them all remotely, keep them updated on my findings and hear about what they had found. As the team come from various academic backgrounds and disciplines: forensic linguistics, biomedical and life science, even a member from Public Health England, I would always receive some super interesting comments and questions regarding what I found.
What did you find interesting?
Vaccination in the present day can be a relatively polarising issue but it was fascinating to learn that this is not new; anti-vaccinationists even in the 19th Century were being called ‘anti-everything cranks’ accused of being neglectful or apathetic, whereas vaccinators were called ‘vampires’, ‘vivisectors’ and ‘butchers’. These names reflected views at the time about stereotypes of anti-vaccinators. Anti-vaccinators, however, argued they had ‘conscientious objections’ and voiced concerns such as the increasing power of the state, particularly over individual bodies, and concerns about the efficacy of the vaccine, both of which are similarly voiced today.
