Call for Papers: AIDS in Culture IV

Aids in Culture IV: Explorations in the Cultural History of AIDS
México City
December 9-13, 2008
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 25, 2008 (deadline extended)

AIDS is not simply an illness or a biomedical phenomenon. The conference cycle "AIDS in Culture" organised by Enkidu Magazine in Mexico City and the International Society for Cultural History and Cultural Studies (CHiCS) in cooperation with CNDH (The National Human Rights Commission in Mexico) seeks to examine cultural responses to AIDS in different cultures and societies across a wide range of perspectives.

The conference will explore the processes by which AIDS is constructed as a cultural phenomenon and how different societies in their encounters with AIDS attempt to create meaning in health, illness and disease. The conference aims at bringing together academics working in all relevant disciplines as well as activists, artists and other professionals, and promoting innovative multidisciplinary and multicultural exchange and dialogue.

Among the themes of interest are the following:

• AIDS and Cultural Texts: Power and Representation.
• Representations of AIDS in art, movies, music, poetry, religion and literature from the 1980s until today.
• Silences and taboos in discourses on HIV/AIDS.
• Aesthetic responses to the challenge. Rituals, customs, and fetishism.
• Cultural practices that influence the spread of HIV/AIDS
• AIDS and collective and individual identities: Race, Class, Gender etc
• AIDS and Politics, Lobbying and Activism: Power, Representation and Activism.
• Constructions and reconstructions of AIDS in political, faith and ideology based discourse, legal issues and policy making throughout the world: Who has the authority to speak and who is silenced?
• AIDS and theory: Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Religious Studies, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Literary Studies and all related disciplines. How do we theorize and analyse experiences and the meaning of illness?
• The ,significance' of AIDS for individuals and communities; the cultural factors influencing our perceptions of health and illness experiences.
• AIDS and psychosocial affects and effects. Cultures of silence.
• Indigenous knowledge and responses to AIDS
• Stories and Histories about AIDS
• AIDS and Oral History
  

Papers will be considered on related themes and topics from a wide range of perspectives. Interdisciplinary perspectives are especially welcome since all these topics in themselves stretch across several disciplines: history, literary studies, linguistics, psychology, political sciences, pedagogy, ethnology, anthropology, sociology...

Graduate and postgraduate students are encouraged to attend and present papers. Selected papers from the conference will also this year be published in book form.

Submission guidelines can be found here.