Temporary Hospitals
As the field hospital NHS Nightingale opens at the ExCeL centre in London, Marie Allitt considers a wartime precedent for temporary spaces of caregiving.
Sick: A Memoir
What hope is there for healing when the medical establishment views not your symptoms, but you yourself as the problem? Christy Zink reviews Sick: A Memoir (2018), Porochista Khakpour’s uncompromising account of her struggle
Finding A Medieval Friend
In these difficult times, many are struggling to engage with academic work. The global hardship of this pandemic— especially for vulnerable people such as the homeless, those with disabilities, those with unsafe home environments, and also because of institutional variance in how far employees are being cared for— seems to necessitate an explicitly personal approach to any writing that happens during this time.
Compassionomics
A powerful call-to-action limited by its inability to adequately define ‘compassion’: Lara Ronan, MD, reviews “Compassiononomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring makes a Difference” by Stephen Trezaciak and Anthony Mazzerelli (2019).
Blood Donation Policy, Activism and the Un/‘Official’ HIV/AIDS Record
Benjamin Weil explores the history of blood donor activism in the UK.
Resurrecting the Present
Is it possible to address the AIDS pandemic without recourse to metaphor? Yes, argues Mícheál McCann, citing the ‘admirable ordinariness’ of Marie Howe’s 1997 collections of poems ‘What the Living Do’.
AIDS and humour after protease inhibitors
What is the role of humour in a genre shaped by loss and mourning? Anna Ferrari explores John Weir’s semi-autobiographical 2006 novel, ‘What I did Wrong’.
(Re)turning to AIDS in Queer Young Adult Fiction
In the age of PrEP and U=U, why does queer young adult fiction remain nostalgic for early AIDS narratives? asks Gabriel Duckels, Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholar at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge.
Building a UK HIV/AIDS Graphic Ephemera Archive
Siân Cook, a Graphic Designer and Senior Lecturer at the London College of Communication (UAL), has been involved with HIV/AIDS organisations and activism for over 25 years. She runs the resource www.hivgraphiccommunication.com, a historic visual archive of promotional campaigns and graphic ephemera.
HIV/AIDS in the 21st Century
Guest editors José Saleiro Gomes, Louisa Hann, and Stian Kristensen, convenors of the Manchester HIV Humanities: HIV/AIDS Research Group, introduce a week-long HIV Humanities takeover of The Polyphony.