Please join us (in-person or online) for this Gender/Sexuality/Culture Interdisciplinary Research Seminar, hosted by the Gender Studies programme at the University of Melbourne.

Teaching Gender to Prevent HIV: AIDS Education in Papua New Guinea

Date: Thursday 21 November 2024, 3PM AEDT Melbourne time
HYBRID Event
On-campus, In-person: Room 461, Arts West Building (North Wing), University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC [map: https://go.unimelb.edu.au/m8tx]
Online: Via Zoom
(Details will be distributed after registration)

Abstract: This talk examines a weeklong AIDS education workshop in rural Papua New Guinea. Gendered inequalities fuel the epidemic globally, and so AIDS awareness workshops often make a point of educating target audiences about these issues. However, AIDS educators sometimes disagree with the content they are supposed to convey, and this can spur “translational activism” – that is, the deliberate transformation or censoring of content – as they wrestle with material they find problematic. In this particular workshop, the AIDS educator transformed the concept of gender into a tool for self-reflection and self-improvement. Nevertheless, the workshop became a space where gendered tensions erupted and gendered inequalities were reproduced. The talk raises questions about how the concept of gender is deployed in health education and shows that HIV awareness workshops are far from emotionally or epistemologically neutral spaces.

Holly Wardlow is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Toronto. She is the author of two monographs, Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society (2006) and Fencing in AIDS: Gender, Vulnerability, and Care in Papua New Guinea (2020), both with University of California Press. Professor Wardlow’s research has focused on gender and health in Papua New Guinea, investigating such issues as women’s sex work, the gendered experiences of HIV vulnerability, and the ways in which women navigate AIDS stigma.

This event will take place in-person at the University of Melbourne's Parkville campus, which is on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people. The venue is wheelchair accessible; please get in touch with the convenors if we can assist with other accessibility concerns.

This is a hybrid event, with set capacity for both in-person and online attendance. Please indicate whether you plan on attending online or in-person when registering. Specific room details and Zoom links will be distributed on the morning of the event to registered attendees, but we hope you can join us on campus if possible.

The Gender Studies programme at the University of Melbourne is committed to providing a welcoming, inclusive, diverse and rigorous scholarly environment for all of our students and staff. Our work critically and ethically addresses contemporary formations of gender, feminism, transgender studies, and sexuality studies. We strive to ensure that the pedagogic and scholarly spaces in which we engage – from the subjects we teach in our undergraduate Major, to our research, and to this seminar series – are pro-actively affirming and inclusive of the diversity in our academic community.