A5. Roundtable Above and Beyond the Archives: Documenting the Black AIDS Epidemic Chair: Antoine S. Johnson, University of California, Davis Evelynn M. Hammonds, Harvard University
Angelique Harris, Boston University
Jennifer Brier, University of Illinois-Chicago
Marlon M. Bailey, Washington University, St. Louis
Polina Illieva, University of California, San Francisco
The medical historian Ayah Nuriddin has a phrase “silences and violences” about the ways in which health inequities affecting African Americans largely go ignored. Many poor and working-class people’s experiences are not documented in archive records. To tell such communities’ stories accurately has required going beyond institutional archive collections. In this session, we explore the trials and tribulations of covering groups who lack archival records and how to tell their stories ethically. By making this a roundtable discussion, we anticipate audience members whose research interests include HIV/AIDS and health activism to share their past and current methods. We also intend to converse on how we as researchers can continue to change our field by collaborating with archivists, organizers, and those closely impacted by our research topic.
Dr. Evelynn M. Hammonds was the first African American historian covering the Black AIDS epidemic. As a participant, she will discuss the challenges of covering a new disease in real time from a historian’s perspective. Similarly, Dr. Angelique Harris’s fieldwork with Black religious leaders on AIDS, gender, and sexuality in Black communities helps scholars contextualize leadership and marginalization among African Americans. As academic scholars, we must consider our target audiences and their access to our material. Dr. Jennifer Brier’s oral history project “I’m Still Surviving” offers ways in which one can see the women’s histories, hear their voices, read about their lives, and teach the project.
Dr. Marlon M. Bailey’s work with Black gay men and men who have sex with men (MSMs) who do not identify as gay or bisexual in underground economies offers a new lens through which to understand sexual health and Black men’s kinship networks. A partnership with the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) provided Bailey the opportunity to conduct such important research. Polina Ilieva, UCSF’s head archivist, has worked exhaustively with local organizers and scholars to expand the university’s AIDS archives. Together, the contributors will discuss their past and current experiences of such work, with room for conversation on future directions in histories of HIV/AIDS and AIDS activism.
