“See the Hope” - Using participatory visual arts methods to challenge HIV related stigma (original) (raw)
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In an attempt to create an AIDS-competent community at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), it is critical to connect HIV and AIDS curricula and co-curricular initiatives with communication campaigns that reach students who may not self-select to attend HIV and AIDS workshops. To this end in 2012, UCT ran four communication campaigns with concomitant anti-HIV-stigma peer education workshops for students on campus. This article provides insight into the initial teaching project developed and designed by the Michaelis School of Fine Art and HAICU (HIV/AIDS, Inclusivity and Change Unit) at the University of Cape Town to engage students in understanding the lived reality of HIV positive students on the campus. Initial findings from a focus group with first year fine art students indicate that the project is a great vehicle towards getting students to engage with what would be termed previously studied areas such as HIV. After this project's success the model utilised by the project team has been taken up by other departments at the University and possible further interdisciplinary collaboration for teaching students are being discussed.
Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning
Body Mapping has been used for thousands of years by people who want to achieve a better understanding of themselves, their bodies and the world they live in. Artist Jane Solomon and psychologist Jonathan Morgan transformed Body Mapping for the “Long Life Project”, during the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) roll-out of antiretrovirals in Khayelitsha township, South Africa in 2001. Body mapping enables participants to tell their stories in the face of intense HIV/AIDS stigma. We adapted Body Mapping for the Women, Art and Criminalizaton of HIV Non-Disclosure (WATCH) study, a community arts based research (CBR) approach to better understand the impact that Canadian laws criminalizing HIV non-disclosure have on women living with HIV. Our national team includes women living with HIV, service providers, and researchers. This reflection illustrates our collective and iterative process of learning, teaching and doing body mapping workshops with women living with HIV in Canada. We share our ...
Irish Journal of Anthropology, 22(1), 262-278., 2019
This article draws from fieldwork in an urban neighbourhood in Maputo among teenagers who, every day, face a complex and precarious landscape of living with the virus of HIV in zones of marginality and social exclusion. I discuss whether creative methodological tools can be helpful to medical anthropology researchers, in order to better understand youth’s experiences of illness, body and subjectivity. Looking for ‘child-centred’ research methods I reflect on issues related to representation, translation, and power when enabling young people’s perspectives through drawings and photography.
Resisting and disrupting HIV-related stigma: a photovoice study
BMC Public Health
Background The stigma associated with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a significant global public health concern. Health care providers and policy makers continue to struggle with understanding and implementing strategies to reduce HIV-related stigma in particular contexts and at the intersections of additional oppressions. Perspectives and direction from people living with HIV are imperative. Methods In this project we amplified the voices of people living with HIV about their experiences of HIV-related stigma in Manitoba, Canada. We used an arts-based qualitative case study research design using photovoice and narrative interviews. Adults living with HIV participated by taking pictures that represented their stigma experiences. The photos were a catalyst for conversations about HIV and stigma during follow-up individual narrative interviews. Journaling provided opportunities for participants to reflect on their experiences of, and resistance to, stigma. Interviews were audio...
Syllabus: ART/AIDS/ACTIVISM: Visual Cultures of the Pandemic
Course Abstract: Since 1981, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has dramatically transformed social, cultural, and creative landscapes across the world. From SoHo studios of the 1980's to modern-day AIDS Poster Activism in Toronto, the HIV/AIDS crisis continues to directly shape the life and work of artists from a spectrum of social locations and identities. This course considers the ways by which these artists, activists, and People Living with HIV/AIDS (PWA) have mobilized art, aesthetics, and cultural production as a medium to confront and complicate representations of the pandemic. Through visualizing the cultural history of HIV/AIDS, we will explore artistic and activist engagement through fine art, graphic design, photography, folk art, and video. From the sexual and racial politics of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Keith Haring to the queer and feminist community art of Jessica Lynn Whitbread, this course will introduce students to racialized, queer, and feminist visual cultures of HIV/AIDS art and activism. Course Description: Through surveying a corpus of HIV/AIDS art and visual culture, we will critically engage with the myriad of social, cultural and political factors that have framed our visualization of the pandemic. From the Culture Wars of 1980s to modern debates over visual and digital surveillance, HIV/AIDS have functioned as a barometer of public attitudes about the relationship between the individual and society. The aim of this course is to directly engage this theme of subjectivity, society, and visual culture to destabilize the dynamics of power and representation in the art history of the pandemic. In examining activist responses to HIV/AIDS, we can clearly illustrate the potency of images as a political tool to resist hegemonic institutional and social forces. By contextualizing this political history alongside (inter)related struggles of race, gender, and sexuality, we will trace the emergence of new forms of queer, feminist, and civil rights activism. In focusing on queer, feminist, and racialized artists and activists, this course turns our attention to the communities historically most affected in order to confront traditional visual and cultural representations of HIV/AIDS. The recent canonization of AIDS visual culture over the past decade has been popularly evident in film and television (Dallas Buyer's Club; Rent) and more recently in museum retrospectives (AIDS, Art, America and I, YOU, WE: Art & AIDS). While these new works are vital for a historical understanding of the enduring AIDS epidemic, this nostalgic focus precariously
Beyond Stigma: what is it to be HIV-positive
Beyond Stigma: what is it to be HIV-positive, 2010
This project explores and presents the dimensions of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-related stigma, which is shown to be the main impediments to initiating, and succeeding in, HIV prevention. Beyond Stigma investigates the impact of HIV-related stigma on social, family and community groups and individuals, and the possible resulting changes in cultural behaviour. It argues that exploring the impact of HIV-related stigma on people living with HIV (PLHIV) through visual-art research functions as a cultural action that clarify associated issues of stigmatisation. Instigating conversations about issues of stigma through conceptually mediated social-commentary artwork forms the core of the research. The research comprises an exploratory and experiential study using a convenience sample, and an extensive self-incidental gathering of data, both of which are founded in heuristic methodology. The convenience sample used consisted of adults who acquired HIV, or have been influenced by HIV-related stigma, including myself. The research in this study combines both empirical and theoretical approaches of heuristic research and seeks to capture and disseminate felt, or tacit, knowledge. This expressed and felt knowledge enables me to unify the in-field activities, the individual experience, and the art practice activities into visual-art research. The artworks establish meaning through image and association, acknowledging the challenges faced by PLHIV. Stigma and discrimination still play a significant role in the lives of PLHIV, affecting their confidence, self-esteem, and quality of life. As a result, significant manifestations of these effects are evident in the literature and in the contributors’ stories, and are demonstrated as harmful to the psychological wellbeing of PLHIV. Manifestations such as isolation, protection, contamination, disclosure, avoidance, ostracism, exclusion, rejection, blaming, assumptions, difference and indifference are the foundations for my mediated creative outcomes. Visual Art outcomes provide a dynamic cultural medium for investigating ongoing conversations of empathy and understanding.
Qualitative Health Research, 2018
HIV/AIDS stigma exists in healthcare and is harmful to people living with HIV (PLWH). Few anti-stigma interventions target undergraduate health professions students, although evidence supports reaching providers early in their training. We developed two different arts-based interventions based on Intergroup Contact Theory: a Photovoice intervention in which they viewed photo-stories of PLWH and a fiction writing intervention in which they developed characters with HIV. We present the results of a qualitative analysis of the post-intervention interviews, to elaborate on what and how students learned from both interventions. Via theme analysis, we identified three similar patterns among both sets of intervention participants. Interventions helped students to understand PLWH as “people first,” experience emotional responses to PLWH, and complicated their understanding of who was living with HIV. All three themes illustrate how Photovoice and fiction writing interrupted stereotypes abou...
2012
This thesis analyses a collaborative arts initiative, Through Positive Eyes South Africa. The thesis focuses on how photography and personal narrative can contribute to changing the lens through which HIV-positive individuals see themselves and the way they are perceived while also problematising the complexities around disclosure and containment in the face of stigma. There are many projects that have sought to alter the dominant lens of stigma around HIV/AIDS in South Africa but the Through Positive Eyes initiative is unique in its process of self-documentation as the group openly confronts the complexities of living with HIV/AIDS. The thesis shows that challenging stigma through art is not as simple as the claim first appears; in fact, it emerges that even in giving full agency to the participants, the boundaries between the private therapeutic process and the public visual encounter are themselves intertwined and blurred by stigma. The thesis analyses the photographs and narratives of six HIV-positive South Africans to explore how their self-portraits contribute to the shift in representation of people living with HIV/AIDS. The thesis is interdisciplinary in its approach for it draws on texts by critical theorists as well as the work of activists and artists. I also engage with the field of African Studies and draw on the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o', Steve Biko and Achille Mbembe to analyse the complexities around representations of HIV/AIDS in Africa and the persistence of stigma in the South African context.
This dissertation evaluates the effects and implementation of an education program aimed at increasing knowledge and changing attitudes about HIV and AIDS among high school students. Using a quasi-experimental pretest posttest design and process and outcome evaluation, the research was conducted in four Newark, New Jersey public high schools. Students in the intervention group attended an art exhibit related to AIDS consisting of the AIDS Museum’s collection, participated in a discussion with an artist living with HIV, and created their own art projects about HIV. Students in the comparison group participated in the standard of care, consisting of the usual HIV education provided through health classes...
Impressions over time: Community progressive murals in an outpatient HIV/AIDS clinic
Arts in Psychotherapy, 2007
This paper describes the process and impact of community progressive mural-making in an HIV/AIDS outpatient clinic. The words and drawings in these murals were the spontaneous expressions of the patients, their families, and the staff at the clinic. Six murals were created over a period of seven months and were housed in the lobby of the clinic. The project revealed unique insights into the inner experiences of the individual patients, and into the culture of the HIV/AIDS clinic community. This paper highlights the parallels between group dynamics, the group art therapy process, and the development of a community culture through the creation a symbolic therapeutic group in a progressive mural.