‘There’s no pill to help you deal with the guilt and shame’: Contemporary experiences of HIV in the United Kingdom

© The Author(s) 2017. The experience of living with HIV, in the global north, has changed significantly over the past 20 years. This is largely the result of effective biomedical methods of treatment and prevention. HIV is now widely considered to be a long-term condition like many others – it has been argued that HIV has been ‘normalised’. Drawing on online qualitative survey data, with respondents aged 18–35 years, diagnosed with HIV in the past 5 years, this research explores contemporary subjective experiences of being diagnosed, and living, with HIV in the United Kingdom. The data reveal ambiguous experiences and expectations, as the ‘normative’ status of HIV exists alongside ongoing experiences of fear, shame and stigma – maintaining its status as the most ‘social’ of diseases. In rendering HIV ‘everyday’, the space to articulate (and experience) the ‘difference’ which attaches to the virus has contracted, making it difficult to express ambivalence and fear in the face of a positive, largely biomedical, discourse. In this article, the concepts of normalisation and chronicity provide an analytical framework through which to explore the complexity of the ‘sick role’ and ‘illness work’ in HIV

Older Artists and Acknowledging Ageism

Intergenerational (IG) learning has the potential to reinforce ageist ideas, through the culturally produced binary of old and young which often describes IG learning. This research with older artists revealed implicit age bias associated with a modernist tradition in art education which minimized the value of art production viewed as feminine. Language associated with ageism shares the descriptors of the feminine and seep into our perceptions. Cooperative action research with multi-age participants facilitated personal growth and through critical reflection, implicit ageism revealed in the researcher’s prior perspective is revealed

Chatterbooks: creating a culture of reading for pleasure

Liz Chamberlain, from The Open University, shares the outcomes of a collaborative project focused on reading for pleasure through the creation of reading clubs, which involved four UK universities and The Reading Agency. In each university, small groups of student teachers decided to trial the Chatterbooks resources with their classes whilst on school placements. The lecturers expected to hear that the children had responded favourably to the ideas and texts talked about during the sessions, however, it was the impact on the student teachers that was the most striking

'Constellations of singularities': the rejection of representative democracy in Coney's Early Days (of a better nation)

This article reflects on two specific performances of Coney’s Early Days (of a better nation) (2014); an interactive piece of theatre which invites its audience, in role as three fractious regions of a post-revolutionary nation, to make a series of decisions to avert the pending crisis and unify the country once more. Running out of money, medical supplies and food, and with inadequate security to protect their remaining sources of power, decisions need to be made quickly on how to act and it is down to the audience to build or reject institutional structures of governance through which such decisions might be made. In both performances I attended, such institutional structures were either rejected or abandoned, providing a lens through which to examine the widespread scepticism of political institutions and democratic forms of representational governance that currently pervades Europe. In this article, I will reflect on how my affective experience within Coney’s theatrical framework illuminated, for me, certain limitations of the trend in current political and philosophical theories to turn away from the authority of representative democracy towards a vision of disparate and singular acts of resistance