Retroviral Cultures: AIDS, Twenty Years On (University of Bristol)
Old Council Chamber, Wills Memorial Building Queen's Road, Bristol, United KingdomRetroviral Cultures: AIDS, Twenty Years On 1 December 2016, 2.00 PM - 6.00 PM Andrew Blades, Maria Vaccarella, Corinne Squire, MK Czerwiec Old Council Chamber, Wills Memorial Building 2016 marks the twentieth anniversary of the 11th International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, at which Taiwanese American researcher David Ho and his team revealed new antiretroviral combination therapies to the world. Before long, Andrew Sullivan was (in)famously writing in the New York Times of the 'end' of AIDS. Twenty years on, the global AIDS pandemic continues, and in the USA there are still 1.2 million people living with HIV. Cultural representations of HIV/AIDS in America – literature, film, television, art – no longer portray AIDS as a death sentence or as a ‘rupture in meaning’ (Edmund White); depending on access to healthcare and education, HIV is primarily a manageable long-term health condition. At the same time, Richard Canning has pondered that the […]