{"id":1214,"date":"2025-04-24T14:50:22","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T13:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/?p=1214"},"modified":"2025-04-24T16:21:49","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T15:21:49","slug":"rebalancing-the-global-story-of-hiv-through-oral-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/2025\/04\/24\/rebalancing-the-global-story-of-hiv-through-oral-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebalancing the Global Story of HIV Through Oral History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dr Wendy Rickard, a member of the Oral History Collective, has secured a prestigious Daphne Jackson Fellowship for her project, \u2018Disrupted Narratives, Exposed Voices:  A Global Analysis of HIV Oral History and its Public Dissemination\u2019. This innovative research sets out to uncover HIV stories from all over the world, particularly the Global South, and reveal new information about the way pandemic history is recorded.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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Photo: An image used for the HIV\/AIDS Needs Assessment produced by Eating Social Services in 1996, Oral History: More Dangerous than Therapy?<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The Daphne Jackson Fellowship<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Daphne Jackson Fellowship<\/a> scheme supports people who have taken a break from their research career for family, caring or health reasons, and combines a research project with retraining and mentoring to help them return into senior academic roles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI\u2019m grateful to the Daphne Jackson Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for this opportunity, and am looking forward to seeing what can be found with modern searching capacities and what lessons can be learned about how we remember future pandemics.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Untold Narratives<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since the start of the HIV\/AIDS epidemic, more than 40 million people have died with AIDS and a similar number live with HIV today. Dr Rickard\u2019s research will ask whether we have HIV stories from all over the world or just from its most privileged parts. This will involve counting recordings, identifying gaps \u2013 particularly in the Global South \u2013 and challenging the imbalance in how the pandemic is historically remembered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cHIV is still going on, especially in vulnerable countries, so we have a chance to rectify any imbalances where HIV experiences may be missing, hidden or unequally valued. This project will question whether oral history resources are unfairly shared, just like HIV medicines meaning that the history we are recording is unbalanced.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Building on Ground-breaking Work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The work will build on Dr Rickard\u2019s research since the 1990s that is held at the British Library Sound Archive, some of which formed the basis for the 2022 BBC TV series,\u00a0\u2019AIDS: The Unheard Tapes\u2019<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cFor the first time in history, oral histories powerfully captured people\u2019s stories of a pandemic as it was happening, providing depth and richness beyond statistics to understand their experiences better.” <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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Photo: A section of the Wall of Love, an AIDS memorial, Oral History: More Dangerous than Therapy?<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Archival Challenges<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Due to the period covered, early interviews were recorded before the internet existed, and there may be issues with those which have been digitised and shared on-line. Even where archives can be identified, there may still be significant gaps in terms of material which has the right permissions to be listened to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project will look for those interviews that may or may not be on websites and will also explore what AI can do in terms of searching for, collecting and digitising material, and who has access to the technology for recording oral histories, testing issues of accessibility and power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Rickard will also seek to find endangered archives where existing stories are under threat and identify how easy it may be for others to find, support and use them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Wendy Rickard, a member of the Oral History Collective, has secured a prestigious Daphne Jackson Fellowship for her project, \u2018Disrupted Narratives, Exposed Voices:  A Global Analysis of HIV Oral History and its Public Dissemination\u2019. This innovative research sets out to uncover … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12060,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12060"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1214"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1226,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions\/1226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/oral-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}