UniCoVac Position Paper: Considerations for University Campus-Based Programmes for COVID-19 and Other Infectious Disease Vaccines

This position paper sets out the rationale, logistics and limitations for delivery of COVID-19, MMR and meningitis vaccines to university students. Key aspects considered are ascertainment of vaccine status and campus-based delivery of vaccines. The approaches described in this position paper require an inter-disciplinary approach. There will be a requirement for data analysts to enable personalised, secure access to vaccination records, for social media experts and sociologists to design appropriate pathways and literature for disseminating information and for public health experts to oversee literature outputs and delivery of campus-based immunisation programmes. Contributions from vaccinologists, economists and modellers will also be required for monitoring and assessing the utility of implemented recommendations.

Contemporary Substance Use in Guyana: The Prison Context

Substance use in contemporary Guyana cannot be dismantled from the historical introduction and control of substances across the British Empire, and this is true in the community as it is in prison. In a form of transhistorical repetition, some of the substances being used have changed since colonial times, but many have also stayed the same, as have the reasons for their use. This paper follows on from ‘the History of Substance Use and Control in British Guiana’ (Moss and Toner, 2020) and explores semi-structured prisoner interviews among a group of male prisoners, which shows that substance use in prison – as in the community - is often a coping mechanism, as well as a way to pass time, escape and alleviate the pains of imprisonment. In this sense substance use is an adaptive strategy to the micro level experiences of transhistorical processes, such as social control, the development of class and ethnic politics, and were central to the nexus of exploitative social and labour relationships on colonial plantations.

Changing Approaches to Mental Healthcare in the Caribbean Conferences on Mental Health, 1957-1969

This paper examines discussions among physicians, psychologists, public health officials, religious leaders and others who participated in the Caribbean Conferences on Mental Health between 1957 and 1969. Their discussions demonstrate major changes in the understanding of causes, definitions and appropriate treatments of mental health conditions, compared to the late nineteenth century, which saw a wave of major reforms to the management of mental illness in public asylums. Although major shifts in professional understandings of mental health were evident in the mid-twentieth century, the Caribbean Conferences on Mental Health reveal that the problems hindering the implementation of these new approaches were largely similar to those that Guyana and other Caribbean countries continue to face today.

Recordkeeping and the Management of Prisons in Guyana

Learning about prison management in Guyana since independence in 1966 is fraught with difficulty due to the paucity of surviving records. This paper investigates attitudes towards and practices of recordkeeping in order to start developing a historical sociology of recordkeeping in Guyana. Within this framework, prison recordkeeping is explored for the colonial and post-independence periods. The paper ends with a consideration of other sources and methods that are needed to provide a fuller picture of both prison management and the experiences had in prison by prisoners and prison officers.

The Gaols of Guyana: Hauntology and Trauma in the soundscape of Prison

Using Hauntology, this paper illustrates how the supposed demise of a socio-political and economic system – colonialism – still impacts on and has something to offer contemporary political analysis in Guyana’s gaols. Drawing on Fiddler’s spatio-hauntology alongside the work of Derrida and Gordon this paper shows how hauntology provides an alternative theoretical framework to look at the intergenerational transmission of trauma, which can be traced back to colonialism and slavery. It acknowledges the impact structural violence has on the collective imaginary and how this – consciously and unconsciously – shapes the psychosocial material underpinning contemporary Guyanese identities, desires, experiences, social action, and systems of punishment which includes prisons – its buildings, space, regimes, processes, sounds, laws and rationale. Guyana’s prisons contain phantoms of the past. Only by acknowledging Guyana’s ghosts and the phantasm of past trauma is it that we can begin to understand contemporary Guyana and Guyanese society, which includes their jails.

History of substance use and control in British Guiana

Whilst the impact of drugs on the culture of Caribbean societies and Indigenous populations is well documented, their role in maintaining influence over an ethnically diverse population and regulating labour productivity are frequently overlooked. In this paper we examine the use of drugs as a means of compelling and retaining labour in British Guiana during the nineteenth century. We also assess changes over time in how the colonial state managed concerns that the use of intoxicants threatened its control over the labouring population through licensing laws, carceral institutions and the criminalisation of certain drugs.

Insanity and Imprisonment in British Guiana, 1814-1966

This paper explores links between incarceration and enslavement, migration, and mental health, in the colony of British Guiana. Contemporaries recognised the negative impact that mobility and labour had on the health and well-being of enslaved persons and Asian immigrants, including on plantations. Understandings of ‘insanity’ later developed to bring ideas about biology, context, and behaviour into dialogue, including through the racialisation of its prevalence and character amongst the colony’s diverse population. Before the construction of separate institutions, people who were believed to be suffering from mental illness were sometimes kept in jails, and due to a lack of capacity this continued even after lunatic asylums were developed from the 1840s. At the same time, colonial administrators recognised that incarceration itself could cause mental ill-health, and as such into the early twentieth century British Guiana engaged with global debates about criminal insanity.

Mental, Neurological and Substance Abuse Disorders in Guyana’s Jails: a multi-disciplinary introduction

An introduction to this LIAS Working Paper special issue, presenting early findings from the University of Leicester and University of Guyana’s partnership research on mental health, neurological disorders, and addiction in Guyana’s jails.

Insanity and Imprisonment in British Guiana, 1814-1966

This paper explores links between incarceration and enslavement, migration, and mental health, in the colony of British Guiana. Contemporaries recognised the negative impact that mobility and labour had on the health and well-being of enslaved persons and Asian immigrants, including on plantations. Understandings of ‘insanity’ later developed to bring ideas about biology, context, and behaviour into dialogue, including through the racialisation of its prevalence and character amongst the colony’s diverse population. Before the construction of separate institutions, people who were believed to be suffering from mental illness were sometimes kept in jails, and due to a lack of capacity this continued even after lunatic asylums were developed from the 1840s. At the same time, colonial administrators recognised that incarceration itself could cause mental ill-health, and as such into the early twentieth century British Guiana engaged with global debates about criminal insanity.

Coloniality and Mental Health, Neurological and Substance Abuse (MNS) Disorders in Guyana’s Prisons Today

There is a relationship between the social actions and social structures laid down during colonialism, and the social hierarchies and inequalities that developed as British Guiana moved slowly from British colony to Independent Guyana. From slavery and indigenous marginalisation, to indentureship and colonial social relations, modern Guyana emerges from the legacies of an Imperial project, and most notably “enslavement, immigration, and population management” (Anderson 2019). In the context of Guyana’s prisons today, the echoes and ghosts of this Imperial project can be said to still haunt the grounds and insides of these decaying buildings, as well as stalking the lives and minds of inmates themselves.