We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production

We Are Having This Conversation Now explores AIDS history, present, and future through conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, highlighting the importance of personal experience, community, cultural production, and connection in creating AIDS-related knowledge, archives, and social change.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 11 November 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

We Are Having This Conversation Now provides a comprehensive exploration of the history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen engaging conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, renowned scholars deeply involved in HIV responses. They delve into multiple timelines of the epidemic, presenting six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing the evolving attention to the crisis from the 1980s to the present. The book begins with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, which the authors use as a lens to examine intersectional organizing, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video, along with numerous other powerful yet overlooked objects, becomes the focal point of their conversations as they explore HIV across time. Throughout the book, Juhasz and Kerr share their own artwork, activism, and personal stories related to the epidemic, illuminating the vital role of personal experience, community, cultural production, and connection in the creation of AIDS-related knowledge, archives, and social change. Through their engaging conversations, they invite readers to reflect on their own experiences and engage in their own AIDS-related culture and conversation.

Weight: 428g
Dimension: 228 x 152 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478018483