In recognition of World AIDS Day, Dr João Florêncio will be delivering a talk entitled “Is the AIDS crisis over?”

Over three decades after the first cases of what we came to know as AIDS were first identified in the US, and exactly 20 years since the development of drug combinations effective in managing HIV, one could be forgiven for thinking the AIDS Crisis is over. However, with treatment estimated to still only reach less than half of the people living with HIV worldwide, numbers of new infections in Europe still rising and key populations still at much higher risk of contracting the virus, the epidemic seems far from over and HIV-positive people still have to face stigma in their daily lives. With only 4 years left for the world to reach the global targets set out by UNAIDS for 2020, this lecture will reflect on the history of the epidemic and on some of the challenges – medical, social, political, and legal – that will need addressing if HIV is to become a thing of the past.

Dr João Florêncio is lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter and a LGBTQ+ and HIV activist. His interdisciplinary research navigates the intersections of visual culture, performance studies, queer theory and posthumanities to, amongst other things, investigate articulations of disease, infection, risk, and non-normative sexual practices in performance and visual culture, and the ways in which those bring notions of non-/in-/sub-humanity to bear on the production of the Self and its circulation in contemporary visual ecologies.

Free but booking essential, book here