Original photo by Heather Mount via Unsplash

Roundtable: AIDS and HIV Activism

Tue 19 May 2020

Online (Zoom)

Abstracts

George Severs (University of Cambridge)
'Religious HIV/Aids Activists and the Practical Politics of Overcoming Shame in Late Twentieth-Century England'

Having established the ways in which shame was used by some religious authorities to establish discourses and cultures which explained HIV/AIDS diagnoses as moral judgments, this paper examines the ways in which groups including the Catholic AIDS Link and the Jewish AIDS Trust agitated for policy changes and shifts in rhetorical tone within their respective religious institutions. Through original oral history interviews and archival research, the paper traces how these groups established spaces for HIV positive people of faith to access information, guidance and networks in ways which affirmed both their faith and their HIV status. In doing so, the paper suggests a new and more nuanced picture of HIV/AIDS activism in late twentieth-century Britain.



Dr Hannah J. Elizabeth (Warwick University)
'"HIV You Must Be Jokin": Recovering the Everyday Experiences HIV Status Disclosure in Late Twentieth-Century Edinburgh'

This paper examines the use of texts by social workers which communicated the lived experience of HIV disclosure for women and children living with HIV in Edinburgh in the late 20th century, recovering traces of how ‘the extraordinary affected the ordinary’ (Whatley and Foyster 2010) and vice versa.

Full abstracts can be found here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28969

Cost: free