Reactions to HIV/AIDS since the 1980s: Transnational and Comparative History Perspectives
30 August – 31 August
Call for Papers, deadline – 15 February 2022
Conference Venue: University of St Andrews
Organisers: Dr. Nikolaos Papadogiannis (University of St Andrews), Dr. Rachel Love (University of St Andrews)
This conference aims to help promote research on the social, cultural, political, and financial implications of HIV/AIDS across the globe from a transnational and comparative perspective. While there has been substantial research on this topic, such literature tends so far to focus on national contexts within Western Europe and North America. In this vein, relevant scholarship has largely, although not entirely, neglected transnational connections, especially among activists and NGOs dealing with AIDS, prior to the late 1990s.
We welcome proposals that take a transnational and comparative perspective. Proposed papers may explore different contexts across the globe since the 1980s, especially regions in the ‘periphery’ of Europe and beyond the ‘West’. Papers that attend to representational diversity in social class, gender, sexual orientation, age and ‘race’ are particularly welcome. Proposals may touch upon at least one of the following subjects and themes:
Subjects
- Civil society organisations and activists. The latter may include subjects who did not necessarily label themselves as ‘AIDS activists’ but still dealt with its social and political impact. Such subjects may include, but not be limited to, sex workers and/or LGBTQI individuals.
- State institutions and policymakers.
- Subjects dealing with health and healthcare, such as social workers, nurses, doctors, and discourses.
- Migrant associations.
- Religious subjects.
- Communities of artists. Filmmakers.
- Journalists, authors, publishers.
Themes
- Discourses about the rights of people living with AIDS.
- Shifting sexual norms and patterns.
- Policy instruments and their negotiation and contestation.
- Protest patterns of AIDS activists.
- Mobilities and migration.
- Structures and ideologies of NGOs and activist organisations addressing people living with AIDS.
- Healthcare structures addressing people living with AIDS.
- Artistic representations of HIV/AIDS.
- Medical representations of HIV/AIDS. Biomedical technologies and people living with AIDS.
- Memory, testimony, and silences of living with AIDS and emotions surrounding them.