Katerina Suverina (Univ. of Konstanz), Tatiana Klepikova (Univ. of Regensburg), and Nikolay Lunchenkov (TU Munich) (Web)

Time: 09.-10.10.2025
Venue: Konstanz
Proposals by: 10.12.2024

Since its emergence in the late twentieth century, the HIV/AIDS virus has caused one of the longest-lasting and deadliest pandemics in human history.[1] This pandemic has had vastly different fates across the world, shaping the image of whole continents (Africa),[2] animating identitarian movements (gay and lesbian movements in the US, the UK, and Western Europe),[3] or facing silence in the public discourse (socialist and post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia).[4]
While primarily situated in the domain of medical science, in Western countries, this pandemic has drawn close attention of researchers focused on the cultural, historical, and anthropological analyses of the phenomenon of HIV/AIDS. They emphasize that the virus has played a central role in challenging not only the healthcare system but also academia, especially the humanities. As Stuart Hall rightly observes, HIV/AIDS “challenges us in its complexity, and in so doing has things to teach us about the future of serious theoretical work.” [5]. American researcher Paula A. Treichler, echoing Hall’s ideas, characterizes HIV/AIDS as an “epidemic of signification”[6] and so does Susan Sontag who famously speaks about “AIDS and its metaphors” in an eponymous essay, where she points out that the question of the new virus is a question of language and representation[7]. In advancing these theorizations of the pandemic, these and other scholars urge us to pause in response to a crisis that creates confusion, panic, and an acceleration of fear, and to diagnose societies, not patients.
The conference orients this call for building up theoretical work in the humanities and social sciences in relation to the HIV/AIDS pandemic towards Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This region has infamously been a hotspot of the pandemic in Eurasia,[8] with the situation worsening steadily. UNAIDS reports foreground ideological rather than medical reasons behind the growing number of HIV-positive people in Eastern Europe.[9] Since the very arrival of the virus in the region during the socialist era, local governments and religious authorities have played a crucial role in silencing the HIV/AIDS-related discourse, obscuring the situation from the public, or weaponized it.[10] Read more … (Web)