February 12-13: A Global Pandemic? Problematizing Universal Strategies Through Localized Experiences of HIV/AIDS

We are excited to announce that former CEREV Postdoctoral Fellow Jenny Doubt and student affiliate from Concordia’s Department of History Ian Bradley-Perrin will be mounting their project A Global Pandemic? Problematizing Universal Strategies Through Localized Experiences of HIV/AIDS in our Exhibition Lab from February 12-13, 2015.

Please join us for a casual guided tour of Jenny Doubt and Ian Bradley-Perrin’s exhibition project “A Global Pandemic? Problematizing Universal Strategies Through Localized Experiences of HIV/AIDS” with Q&A session in CEREV’s Exhibition Lab from 5 – 7 PM on February 12, 2015.

Vernissage, Guided Tour & Q&A
February 12, 2015
5 – 7 PM
CEREV Exhibition Lab
JW McConnell Library Building, LB-671.10
1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W.
Concordia University

Come see the product of much hard work on the part of former CEREV Postdoctoral Fellow Jenny Doubt and our student affiliate Ian Bradley-Perrin. Their experimentation in curation, “A Global Pandemic? Problematizing Universal Strategies Through Localized Experiences of HIV/AIDS” will be open to the public for drop-in visits at CEREV’s Exhibition Lab on February 13, 2015 from 12 – 5 PM.

A Global Pandemic? seeks to examine the experience of HIV/AIDS in significantly different localised contexts in Canada, America, South Africa, Brazil and Ukraine, thus revealing one of the limitations of universalised HIV/AIDS strategies focused on ‘universal access to antiretroviral therapy’, namely their failure to consider the significant nuances introduced by gender, age, class and urban/rural context that ultimately differentiate national and regional experiences of HIV and AIDS.

While A Global Pandemic? takes as its historical basis the violences wrought as a result of the lack of publicly accessible antiretroviral medication in South Africa and the United States, it also seeks to challenge universalized HIV/AIDS strategies that have emerged from that conflict by challenging the increasingly imposed notion that ‘AIDS is over’ or ‘treatable’ on a global scale.

Drawing on Bradley-Perrin’s knowledge of HIV/AIDS in the North American context (he is completing his Master’s degree on the history and impact of class relations within AIDS activist organizations and their effects on HIV-related policy and the law) and Doubt’s knowledge of the South African context of the epidemic (her doctoral research interrogated the capacities of cultural texts in intervening in the HIV/AIDS epidemic by examining to what extent theatre, literature, documentary film, but also memory box-making and body mapping have been instrumental in negotiating issues relating to breaking silence around HIV/AIDS), this project developed as a result of their desire to examine the extent to which these two contexts can meet productively in an exhibition space. The visualization of the disparate realities of the HIV pandemic is necessary to conceptualise, not a world without AIDS but one in which the needs of People Living with HIV/AIDS are prioritized and met in all their diversity.

Since completing her doctorate, Dr. Jenny Doubt has worked as a Project Manager based in rural Eastern Cape (South Africa) and as a Postdoctoral Research Officer at Oxford University (UK) to develop, implement and evaluate a culturally-adaptable child-abuse prevention programme for HIV/AIDS-affected families. The project operates in partnership with the Universities of Oxford and Cape Town, South African government, NGO Clowns Without Borders South Africa, UNICEF and WHO.

As a 2014 postdoctoral affiliate at CEREV, Concordia University, her research interests included exploring the potential for a productive meeting between the South African and North American HIV/AIDS epidemics through involvement with the Collective Strategies for Visual Production on the Issue of HIV Criminalisation (Montreal, January 2014) and Flash Collectives: Creating Agile Strategies for Social Change (Brooklyn, February 2014) both led by activist, artist and writer Avram Finkelstein. During her time at CEREV she enjoyed working closely with Ian Bradley-Perrin. A Global Pandemic? is the result of what will hopefully be an ongoing collaboration with him.

Ian Bradley-Perrin is completing his Master’s degree on the history and impact of class relations within AIDS activist organizations and their effects on HIV-related policy and the law.

For the past seven years, he has worked as a community activist and organizer with a focus on LGBTQ issues and HIV/AIDS. He has worked for the Sexuality Studies program since 2011 and has coordinated the HIV/AIDS Community Lecture Series since 2013 alongside numerous other community festivals, events, conferences and forums dedicated to HIV/AIDS, social justice and LGBTQ issues. He has partnered with groups such as AIDS Action Now! Visual AIDS and most recently The SERO Project producing campaigns and works that address HIV stigma, criminalization and treatment and healthcare access.

He has recently been named one of the top 100 people under 30 working to end HIV/AIDS by POZ Magazine.

Center for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence