The witness seminar: A research note

The ‘witness seminar’ as a method for recording contemporary histories is neither well known nor widely employed. By inviting a number of people who were involved in a particular historical event to come together and tell this history collectively, the method enables the production of rich and compelling accounts of contemporary histories. In this article, I introduce the method and the procedures followed in four witness seminars that I organised and co-convened on various topics relating to HIV. I then go on to reflect on the value of this method and how the connections between seminar participants both gave shape to the narrative produced and were also telling of the collaborative history of HIV. </jats:p

‘Not in our Name’: Vexing Care in the Neoliberal University

In this paper, we draw on our collaborative work running a salon for thinking about care in STS research, which quickly became more about fostering an ethico-politics for thinking with care as a mode of academic intervention. Not dissimilar to the origins of the salon in nineteenth-century France, the salon provided a provocative and disruptive space for early career researchers (ECRs) to think together. As attention and critique increasingly point towards the unequal distribution of harms arising from marketization and the vulnerability of ECRs in the ‘neoliberal university,’ we have witnessed a surge in activities that promise a supportive space, such as pre-conference conferences, seminar series, discussion forums and self-care workshops. In this paper, we ask not only what these modes of care might make possible, but also what exclusionary practices and patterns they mask or render more palatable (Ahmed, 2004; Duclos & Criado, 2020; Martin et al., 2015; Murphy, 2015). Reflecting on our experiences of organizing and participating in the salon, with the stated purpose to explore ‘ecologies of care’ as an embodied socio-material practice (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), we move from care ‘out there’ in STS research to care ‘in here’. We follow threads spun by and out from the group to rethink our own academic care practices and how to do the academy otherwise

Witness Seminar: Antiretroviral Drugs up to and Including the Proposition of TasP and PrEP in the UK

The witness seminar is part of a series convened by Emily Jay Nicholls and Marsha Rosengarten, Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP), Goldsmiths, University of London. The series forms a component of research within “Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health” (EUROPACH), a collaboration between four European universities – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Institute for European Ethnology), Goldsmiths, University of London (Department of Sociology), University of Basel (Department of History) and Jagiellonian University (Institute of Sociology)

Witness Seminar: Women and HIV in the UK

The witness seminar is part of a series convened by Emily Jay Nicholls and Marsha Rosengarten, Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP), Goldsmiths, University of London. The series forms a component of research within “Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health” (EUROPACH), a collaboration between four European universities – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Institute for European Ethnology), Goldsmiths, University of London (Department of Sociology), University of Basel (Department of History) and Jagiellonian University (Institute of Sociology)

Witness Seminar: The Criminalisation of HIV Transmission in the UK

The witness seminar is part of a series convened by Emily Jay Nicholls and Marsha Rosengarten, Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP), Goldsmiths, University of London. The series forms a component of research within “Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health” (EUROPACH), a collaboration between four European universities – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Institute for European Ethnology), Goldsmiths, University of London (Department of Sociology), University of Basel (Department of History) and Jagiellonian University (Institute of Sociology)

Witness Seminar: HIV Prevention and Health Promotion in the UK

The witness seminar is part of a series convened by Emily Jay Nicholls and Marsha Rosengarten, Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP), Goldsmiths, University of London. The series forms a component of research within “Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health” (EUROPACH), a collaboration between four European universities – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Institute for European Ethnology), Goldsmiths, University of London (Department of Sociology), University of Basel (Department of History) and Jagiellonian University (Institute of Sociology)

The Techno–Barbie Speaks Back: Experiments with Gendered Hormones

In Testo Junkie, Preciado briefly introduces the figure of the ‘techno-Barbie’. Contrasted with his own Testogel-fuelled pornographic experiments, the possibilities of oestrogen or progesterone seem somewhat uncharitably foreclosed upon. Though Preciado draws our attention to the gendered politics of chemical enhancement and hormonal justice, it begs the question: where do we draw the line between experimentation and chemical domination? We engage with the figure of the techno-Barbie to explore our own experiments with hormones and gendered agency in the boundaries of advanced biocapitalism. Drawing on a range of allied texts, we explore the ambivalences of our own hormonal experimentation. What kinds of hormonal experiments are allowed to be cast as such? In response to this all-encompassing theory of domination, we ask: how might the techno-Barbie speak back

Situating adherence to medicines: The embodied practices and hinterlands of HIV antiretrovirals.

Adherence to medicines tends to be envisaged as a matter of actors' reasoned actions, though there is increasing emphasis on situating adherence as a practice materialised in everyday routines. Drawing on the qualitative interview accounts of Black African women living with HIV in London, UK, we treat adherence to HIV medicines as not only situated in the practices of the immediate and everyday but also relating to a hinterland of historical and social relations. We move from accounts which situate adherence as an embodied matter of affect in the present, to accounts which locate adherence as a condition of precarity, which also trace to enactments of time and place in the past. Adherence is therefore envisaged as a multiple and fluid effect which is made-up in-the-now and in relation to a hinterland of practices which locate elsewhere