People Weavers

In my first notes from my internship in the summer of 2023, as I was exploring the Forum and its website, I was struck by the metaphor they use to describe the work of public scholarship: “We are people weavers,” the site professes.

“What a lovely and rich archive,” I wrote in my notes from that first week, next to my jotting down of the “people weavers” phrase. My work was to begin the cataloguing process for that archive, a vast collection of conversations, events, projects, and writings spanning the 10 years since the Forum’s founding. The archive represents community experts, scholars, artists, performers, writers, and educators, knitted together with the communities of Duke, Durham, North Carolina, and beyond.

Many distinguished guest speakers have been hosted, but they do not just speak; they converse. The Forum’s preferred pattern of weaving is the conversation, putting surprising ideas and their originators together. It is a hard format to archive. For some of these ephemeral exchanges, the Forum is content to know that it happened, and its importance existed in a distinct moment. Other conversations were recorded, and here, the work of weaving people does not end when the conversation is over. To encounter the archive is to become a part of the web.

Inoculation

My work in the video archive was to refine captions, and I picked first a conversation from 2014, “Eula Biss’s On Immunity: Vaccination and the Public Good.” Eula Biss was brought to Duke to discuss her book, On Immunity: An Inoculation, and be in conversation with Saiba Varma, medical anthropologist and, at the time, a Duke professor (now at the University of California, San Diego), and Barry Saunders, a professor in the Department of Social Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill. The conversation was moderated by then-writer-in-residence at the Center for Documentary Studies, Duncan Murrell.

The gravitational pull of this video might be self-evident: after living through a pandemic and hearing so much about vaccinations—and the complicated ideas of morality ascribed to them—I wondered how such a conversation from the “before” times would strike listeners in 2023.

As I edited the captions, the real surprise was not at all about attitudes towards vaccination, but the abiding interest of the panel in how we talk about vaccination. The language surrounding inoculation seems to be as powerful as the science behind it.

“This book is as much about metaphor as it is about vaccination,” Biss says, noting how immunologists use different metaphors than parents use when it comes to vaccinating, revealing shifting understandings of the process. Saunders adds his own metaphors into the mix, naming the 30 sections of Biss’s books “nodes,” calling to mind the immune system itself.

 

On these musings of language, I was prompted to pick up Biss’s book, where I was greeted with yet another metaphor: Biss’s enduring use of the vampire. If it feels odd to bring in supernatural beings as her metaphor of choice, rest assured she is in good historical company. She first notes the 1881 pamphlet The Vaccination Vampire, equating vaccinators of children with vampires feasting on their blood. Later she brings in Dracula, our most famous vampire from literature, a “monster whose monstrosity is contagious,” as a figure standing in for the fear of contagion that lies at the root of all vaccination.

Vampires

That vampires are a ripe metaphor is something Biss notes: “’If you want to understand any moment in time, or any cultural moment, just look at their vampires,’ says Eric Nuzum….Our vampires are not like the remorseless Victorian vampires, who had a taste for the blood of babies and did not seem to feel badly about it. Our vampires are conflicted.”

Biss’s vampires arrive in her text to explain power, fear, and what it means to live in relation to others.

Vampires have collected meanings over time, standing in for our anxieties. So too, if we want to understand Biss’s argument in a given moment, we can look to her vampires. After complications giving birth to her son, she fears the exsanguination that vampires represent. She explains the complicated relationship between emerging technologies and their users with references to Dracula’s vampire hunters, who use new recording and typing technologies throughout the text. Biss’s vampires arrive in her text to explain power, fear, and what it means to live in relation to others. Far from consistent “characters” in her book, her vampires are symbols that appear just when she needs them most.

Biss wrote her book during a cultural fixation on vampires. In 2014, when the book was published, I was in high school and obsessed with all things vampire she mentions: Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, True Blood. My lasting enjoyment of vampires had me reading, just one week before encountering Biss’s book, Deborah Harkness’s Time’s Convert, a sequel to her Discovery of Witches. Remarkably, Harkness has a vampire responsible for vaccinating the entire American Revolutionary Army on Washington’s orders. Biss recounts the same event—sans fangs—alongside an explanation of early vaccination methods. One would draw a thread through an infected person’s smallpox blisters before drawing it through a healthy person’s open wound to deliver a small dose of the virus. The procedure would have read as completely new to me had I not just encountered a dashing vampire performing such a method. Biss is not the only one to have made connections between vampires and viruses, contagions and monstrosity.

It's no accident that both Biss and Harkness deploy vampires: to write for a public is not to simplify, but to speak in a language that we all speak, what Biss calls “vernacular.” When Biss reflects on genre, she says “part of my job is to be a generalist in conversation with experts and with people who have areas of specialization.” Her essays are for any audience, and vampires her point of connection. For Harkness, a Professor of History at University of Southern California, the vernacular is fiction. Her exploration of history comes alive through the world of vampires; given that they might never die, they are living histories themselves, as alive to the reader as history is to Harkness.

It's no accident that both Biss and Harkness deploy vampires: to write for a public is not to simplify, but to speak in a language that we all speak, what Biss calls “vernacular.”

Vampires are my own resonance, bringing these two wildly different texts together through my personal archive of reading. What strikes me as so powerful about Biss’s writing is the way her generalist approach allows for so many other resonances, reaching into other personal archives. One listener, working on Shakespeare, recalled a line from “The Comedy of Errors”:

For if we two be one, and thou play false,
I do digest the poison of thy flesh,
Being strumpeted by thy contagion.

Shakespeare, too, writes contagious metaphors.

*****

In many ways, weaving is its own metaphor for research: We bring together strands of thought. In weaving, the weft moves back and forth over itself, reaching the edges before turning back to go over, building off itself. Patterns may only be made clear after many reversals of the weft. Revisiting the past conversation with Biss opened me up to vampires and vaccination, Shakespeare and metaphor. This is the return to the archive: to go back over, to add, to build, revisit and reimagine. The Forum calls itself “people weavers,” and I’ve been woven into their tapestry.

In the spirit of return, the Forum invites you to look back to their archive and find connections of your own, both new ones and, perhaps, memories of the ways you were woven into their past programs.

*****

Post-script, February 2025

I wrote this piece as the world was opening back up after the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccination had become a shorthand for political arguments fueled by pseudoscientific conspiracy theories. Now, in 2025, I read news of the confirmation of a nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services who has indulged in arguments that vaccines are inherently unsafe, among other fringe health theories, and despite substantial scientific evidence to the contrary. This confirmation is one of many on the heels of a presidential election that I see driven by fear.

What lasts with me most about Biss’s book is the empathy she has for those who are afraid, and the resonances she found with her own fears and their manifestations.

To return to Biss’s vampire metaphor, the American public has a fear of contamination: a fear of the vampiric other who might arrive from outside our borders and drain our resources, perhaps, or of other vampires who might infect our children with queerness or indoctrination in critical race theory. And yes, there is still the continual fear of the vampire who wants to inject children with a schedule of vaccinations.

What lasts with me most about Biss’s book is the empathy she has for those who are afraid, and the resonances she found with her own fears and their manifestations. Biss, in the end, found trust in experts, willing to forego the fear of what she didn’t know to follow the guidance of what she does know, and the scientific experts who assist us.

Finding that empathy for those who are afraid now is challenging when the conditions have been created to do great harm to the most vulnerable among us. But, if community can be just one avenue of overcoming the pervasiveness of fearmongering, of which vaccinations have become one of an array of talking points, then maybe there is hope in exchanging conversations and ideas, of listening to past conversations in archives, and attempting to build from empathy.