Women’s and Gender Studies, Faculty of
Arts, and the School of Public Health
Invite you to a Seminar by
Corinne Squire
Narratives of living with HIV and ARVs: Reconfiguring the epidemic
DATE:
TIME:
VENUE:
Thursday 16 July 2015
12.30 for 1.00
Seminar room 1H, School of Public Health, University of the Western Cape
Narratives of living with HIV and ARVs: Reconfiguring the epidemic
Drawing on 2011 and 2012 interview studies about HIV support in the UK and South
Africa, and relating them to some contemporary trends within the HIV epidemic, this
presentation will explore how personal narratives of living with HIV and ARVs provide
detailed explorations of HIV as a 'naturalised' phenomenon, but also register
denaturalising inequities within the epidemic, and open up routes towards different,
more equitable futures. Narratives can act as emergent forms of microtheory: highly
particular, yet allowing understanding of overlooked issues. I will discuss how this
microtheorisation happens within contemporary personal narratives about HIV, at a
time of health, economic, social and affective precarity, when the HIV pandemic is both
naturalised by its medicalization, normalisation and marketization, and denaturalised by
difficulties of treatment, continuing, often gendered stigma, and resource constraint.
The paper will argue that personal narratives of 'living on' with HIV in the UK, and
'living with' HIV in South Africa, can work to reconfigure both naturalised and
denaturalised relations to the epidemic.
Corinne Squire is Professor of Social Sciences and Co-Director of the Centre for
Narrative Research at the University of East London. Her research interests are in
HIV and citizenship, popular culture and subjectivities, and narrative theory and
methods. Recent publications include Living with HIV and ARVs: three-letter lives
(Palgrave, 2013), Doing narrative research edition 2 (with Molly Andrews and Maria
Tamboukou, Sage, 2013) and What is narrative research? (with Mark Davis, Cigdem
Esin, Molly Andrews, Barbara Harrison, Lars-Christer Hyden and Margareta Hyden,
Bloomsbury, 2014).
RSVP: Mawaddah Abrahams wgs@uwc.ac.za or Tammy Shefer tshefer@uwc.ac.za 0219592234