Welcome, everyone, to Big Tent. Live events. The Lockdown Live Online event series brought to you by Torch,
the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities as part of the humanities cultural programme itself.
One of the founding stones for the future, Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities here in Oxford.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm a professor of French literature. A fellow is Edmund Hall and I'm also the knowledge exchange champion here at Torch.
The Big Lie, Big Tent Live event series is our way of bringing together once a week researchers and students,
performers and practitioners from across the different humanities disciplines.
We will explore important subjects and ask challenging questions about areas such as the environment, medical, humanities,
ethics and A.I. The public, the private and the common good will celebrate storytelling and music, performance and identity.
We're bringing you this event programme online to complement social distancing with creative connexion.
We hope that you're all safe and well during this difficult time. Everyone is welcome in our big tent.
So please make yourself metaphorically as well as literally at home this evening as we explore living with Pandemic's, finding new narratives.
In other words, how might we gain experiential,
critical and historical perspective and insight into how societies have responded to pandemics throughout the world and throughout time?
How might we use this understanding and insight to explore aspects of the new narratives and cultural forms
that emerge from pandemics and give shape and meaning to our own emerging realities in our own critical time?
Now I'm going to embarrass both our speakers by saying a little bit more about them,
about their work and why we thought it would be good to bring them together to discuss these questions this evening before we start.
But before doing that, I'd also like to remind you that if you would like to put forward any questions to us,
because during the event this evening, please pop them in the comments box on YouTube.
We encourage you to submit these as early as possible so that we have time to answer as many as possible in the Q&A,
which will follow our initial discussion in about half an hour. Now onto our excellent speakers tonight.
It's an honour to host and welcome Robin Gauna, international AIDS activist,
feminist co-founder and now chair of the St. John's College Women's Network,
and also Erica Charter's fellow of Wolfson College,
associate professor of global history and director of the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Tech Technology.
Welcome, both of you. Robin was until the end of her second year hard at work studying theology as an
undergraduate whilst also spending a good deal of her time engaged in student drama.
It was when she saw an early performance of The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer that she signed up as a volunteer with the UK's new AIDS charity.
The Terrence Higgins Trust. The rest is, as they say, history for Robin became a leading part of the global response to AIDS and a meeting,
an inspiring global and local campaigns and organisations, including, she decides, the global women's rights movement that she co-founded in 2017.
The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health,
hosted by the WTO and a range of AIDS organisations from those supported by the UK's Department for
International Development through to societies and social movements in Australia and most recently,
South Africa. Robin's own experience has taught her that hope and massive social change must
and do in fact do remain imaginable even in the midst of rage and death.
Vamps, virgins and victims. How can women fight? AIDS was her first book.
And it was, in fact, one of the first books about women and AIDS.
And she's now working on a feminist memoir exploring a life lived between two pandemic's to today's discussion.
She brings not only a good deal of recent critical writing on the many connexions between the two pandemics,
but also reflections on her current experience of living with Koven 19 in her own body.
There is, as we know, no simple answer to the problem of disease, but disease is also far more than a medical or scientific problem.
This is something that Erica Charters has taught us in much of her own work,
which explores the history of war, of disease and of bodies, particularly in the British and French empires.
Her prise winning first book, Disease, War and the Imperial State, looks in particular the welfare of British armed forces during the seven year war.
Back in the 1752 around 200 years ago, although it was of course, one of the things we might discuss today,
the association between war and disease and indeed the rhetoric of war around disease is living and very strong.
Even today, Erica's work traces both in rich detail and with a claw clear, strong narrative.
The ways in which responses to disease shaped not only military strategy and medical theory,
but also the culture, the metaphors, the language of British imperial authority and arguably still do today.
Now, Waste based at Wilson College here in Oxford, though, speaking to us today from Texas,
Erica's most recent work out just in the next few days, I think,
and we'll try to put a link to it up on the website forms part of a collaborative special
issue of the journal Centaurus on the history of epidemics in the time of Convit 19.
I can't think of two better people to help us think about the disciplines of the
history of science and medicine and how they might productively respond to the
current pandemic and also how social movements and individual engaged action
might help us to clarify our collective cultural understanding of covered 19.
So without further delay, I'm delighted to hand over to Robin to get the conversation started.
Robin. Thank you, Wes. Thank you, Erika, and thank you, Torch, for this extraordinary opportunity to join you today.
And for a very generous introduction. I think that this conversation about finding new narratives is so important to me.
And if before becoming becoming aware that I had covered symptoms and living for the past three or four weeks with with the
complexities of this very strange and unusual disease that we're becoming aware of and starting to understand medically.
But I think for me, one of things that's been really important as as Kovar has burst into our world over the past five months,
is seeing how these narratives of a strange,
terrifying killer disease fit with what I experienced all those years ago, 35, 40 years ago as HIV was emerging into our world.
And many of these same conversations were happening of fear and contagion.
And the combination of death, disease and people's personal behaviour wreaking havoc on society.
And I think the sort of medicalisation of the conversational it has been really striking before I myself developed it.
But also just in the way in which we think of this as something about science.
And yet really it's something about society. And that was one of the great things we learnt about HIV.
So I'm particularly excited to be learning from Erica.
And I'd love to hear some more about your reflections with that longer history.
My life's between two pandemics, but you know, far more about more. Thanks for that, Rob.
And also thank you to us.
I think one of the things that has really struck me in the midst of this current pandemic is, of course, the turn to history.
And probably because I think the present and the future seems so uncertain.
And so there's something kind of as I've written elsewhere.
There's something fascinating and eerie when you're someone who works on the history of disease to
have a pandemic playing out and to be seeing all of things which you've been researching in the past.
So debates about quarantine and isolation and debates about contagion, about personal responsibility,
about this very real tension in public health between individuals and the good of society
to see them play out in real time and to try to think about what your role is also.
I think I've been struck by this. What is it that has trains can offer?
Historians have been frequently asked in the midst of the pandemic, what can we learn from history?
What does history tell us about how to act?
And as both someone who's a researcher but also thinking about discussions I've been having with my students,
I think is a really important moment to be reflecting on. Are there lessons that history can tell us?
What is it that we provide as scholars as well as humans to this discussion?
So a lot about what I've been dealing with as thinking about narratives and how we write narratives,
but also how we maybe rethink narratives and reframe them. I mean, Robin,
I wonder if I could ask you I've been really fascinated thinking about your own personal experience of thinking about health and disease.
And I was struck by when we had a brief conversation before your reflections
on what made you enter into this world of AIDS and activism of public health,
and especially because you mention you have this insider outsider relationship with public health.
So would you want to talk a little bit about what that means? Sure.
And as was mentioned in his opening comments,
today is is a very significant day of reflection for those of us who've been involved in AIDS activism since the earliest days,
because many of us had the privilege of knowing Larry Kramer and being shouted at by Larry Kramer
or being inspired by Larry Kramer and my entry point to the global epidemic that is AIDS,
the pandemic that AIDS is with through the theatre. And I was studying theology.
I am very much of the humanities.
And through my career and my activism in AIDS, I found myself five years ago in a very senior role in the World Health Organisation.
I think perhaps the most senior non doctor in the organisation, which caused a whole pile of challenges.
It is, of course, the World Health Organisation, and health is about the complete experience of being human.
I think my favourite definition is health is a resource for living, and yet health is often reduced to medicine.
Epidemics are often reduced to the test tube and the earnest picture of people looking down the microscope.
But for me, the entry point to health was the rage that Larry Kramer brought through his play,
The normal heart that I saw when I said I was an undergraduate.
And that sparked something very deep in me, because at that time I was grieving the death of a dear friend who hadn't died of AIDS.
But he was gay. And the homophobia that erupted around his death felt to me so poignant with the home phobia that was erupting around HIV.
And so I entered this conversation of HIV from a perspective of human rights, of discrimination, upheld.
The most vulnerable people who were early infected were the people who hated most who were discriminated against by the state.
And its continued to be an epidemic of vulnerability.
And I think that one of the shocks to make my early on in the Kovik narrative
was that people were talking about Kofod as an equal opportunities virus.
And we used to talk about HIV or AIDS as an equal opportunities virus in the first decade.
Neither recal, opportunities, viruses and viruses.
Very rarely are they. Can't they take the fault lines in society?
It's people who are poor, who have such little choice, who end up in the main with the virus in their bodies.
Now, that's not my case, but it is the majority case.
And I think unless we look at it culturally and societally, we don't engage well with pandemics.
Yeah, I think so. My interest in disease very much came out of first my interest as a historian.
So thinking about how society is one of the things you often see in historians is whether or not they're
thinking about the past as a kind of template for what the future then becomes or the present becomes,
or whether you think about the past as a kind of past as a foreign country.
So trying to imagine how things are different. And to me, working on the seventeen hundreds.
Very often it is. Thinking about how different it is and what's often fascinated me throughout my career
is how disease and bodies are thought to be these kind of stable biological entities.
They're they're part of nature. They're natural. And yet when you read a history of disease or when you write a history of bodies,
you realise that actually people have conceived of them in very different ways.
And especially when it comes to something such as disease, you realise that it's a social entity as well.
It's a cultural entity as well. People have very different ways of understanding them.
So especially in my period, disease is not necessarily seen as something that's coming from the outside,
which we see especially with the 19th century, the bacteriological revolution.
But instead, is this kind of disorder that comes from within your body, which then,
of course, has all these implications for who's responsible, how you cure it.
What factors are taken into account. So if it's me,
it's it's very useful to be thinking about how providing the history of something can help us to rethink some of the assumptions we have,
including, like you said, the definition of health.
The definition of what causes disease is much wider, broader, in some ways more encompassing.
In the period that I research, I was really struck by even in those medicine, Viju,
those people who are writing histories of medicine were very explicit that the experiencing
AIDS in their lifetime also made them rethink their own approaches to the history of medicine.
And I wonder, I mean, for you, obviously, it was a kind of watershed period.
Can you talk a little bit about in your memoirs and in your own thoughts how you feel AIDS maybe reshaped some of these narratives?
I think and I've been fascinated learning from you about the sort of long tail of history around this.
And I suppose with HIV, you know, it's a disease of travel as we are now discussing.
Curve 19 is the disease of travel.
And that became evident very early on that there was something new happening in our world of intermingling between people.
And I mention it because one of the things that I think happened with AIDS very early is a global response emerged.
And and that response was both because the epidemic was spreading, which is a horrible term,
rarely used, but it was expanding in different countries around the world,
but also because that was happening with communities that had been connecting and often connecting from a rights based approach.
So when I was with the 10 seconds trust in the mid 90s, 80s,
a lot of our dialogue was with New York and San Francisco and Sydney and Paris and Berlin.
And why? Because these were gay epicentres. And so there was a conversation inherent there.
And I think something very special that has happened around the AIDS crisis is a real
sense of global solidarity and people who would not normally connect with each other,
becoming connected as as the epidemic expanded and different populations became infected and started to experience it in their lives.
So you would see in the early 90s a sense of absolute outrage from often quite privileged white gay males in urban settings who had encountered a
poor black woman at a conference and suddenly understood the poverty and difficulty of her life because she couldn't get treatment and they could.
But the other major thing was that because the earliest cases were amongst people who, quite frankly, were often quite privileged,
often had access and had a huge sense of expectation that their lives would continue, that they were beginning of their lives.
They got very, very angry. And that's really the Larry Kramer story,
is the story of a band of young gay men in New York who heard his rage and took up arms
in a in a way of battling with the authorities for treatments to be made available.
And here I am using military language, which I loathe.
But there was a really strange shift yesterday in reflecting on Larry Kramer's life, Tony Fouchier,
who's now well-known around the world because he has to stand next to Trump quite regularly.
But a man who was fundamental to the AIDS response globally talks about how life pre Larry and post Larry changed in medicine because there
was a complete flipping of the medical conversation and suddenly people living with the disease had access to the scientific establishment.
And then a very early way with Kovik 19, I'm discovering that's a whole community of other people who've developed Kotick 19.
And we have. Expertise in these areas of public health and global health.
And we're starting to make demands collectively, which follows in the footsteps of those early AIDS pioneers.
It strikes me that part of what this reminds us is the power of narratives and who can who can articulate those
narratives and the power and kind of thinking about who's able to speak and to use them to achieve certain ends.
So I was struck by how in the midst of this I've been rereading one of the things that's happening,
the Mr. Crisis as a colleague and I have started a reading group in history,
science and medicine with some of our doctoral masters students purely because they I think
they felt like they wanted some guidance that wanted to be able to talk about things.
But also, I think this kind of comfort and just reading history to be able to rethink where we are.
And one of the classic text which we've returned to is an article written by this writer in medicine, Charles Rosenberg,
published in 1989, which was in published in the midst of the AIDS epidemic as a response called What is an Epidemic?
And Rosenberg. Koop worked a lot on colour in the 19th century, but was also reflecting on what AIDS was making him rethink.
As someone in America in that period and end, part of his point is that epidemics are social events.
They're not just biological events. And he he writes how a true epidemic is an event.
It's not a trend and ties it to the notion of it being a drama with different stages in which it unfolds.
It's a narrative. It has plot. It has actors. And that's the interesting point in some ways, is how therefore all epidemics can be somewhat similar.
Right. They have this kind of opening, this initial ignorance, but also in some ways initial denial.
And then there's a middle period in which there's kind of the crisis unfolding, the middle of the plot,
which is full of uncertainty, and how it also demands this collective response in which societies turn to rituals,
to collective action, to demands for a response, and how even as, as Rosenberg pointed out, even this modern technological,
secular 20th century America was still spreading to these very fundamental rituals and demands for action.
And then how, in some ways, the disease slowly subsides or disappears.
It doesn't have to, of course, actually disappear. But the kind of urgency of the situation disappears.
And so I was really struck by how Rosenberg here was drawing on his work from the 19th century, was applying it to AIDS.
And here we are using it again to talk about what's happening now.
And it resonated with me as well, because my sense is in the AIDS epidemic, this notion of narrative of being able to speak right,
which was such a constant slogan to to not be silent, was part of a response to,
in some ways challenging, just having the medical establishment become behalf of patients,
but rethinking political structures and really thinking power structures by having someone else give the narrative.
I wonder how that also has played into your activism and your writing and thinking about who should be involved.
I think that's so fascinating to take that long view and so many thoughts in terms of listening to to your reflections.
And one of the things that feels very present is this whole point about the personal narrative and the personal story.
And, of course, particularly initially amongst the New York the American gay community,
there was this flipping of the dialogue around science, but that came about because patients became visible.
They became agents. People were living with HIV not being HIV victims.
And I was really struck in one of the ghosty press conferences the other day where Boris Johnson,
I think it was yesterday, started talking about people as Kofod sufferers.
You know, I had one of those moments of yelling at the radio and, you know, of course, I have suffered in the last few weeks is not been pleasant.
But I know that I did suffer. I'm a human being. I haven't to it in my body.
I'm hoping it goes away soon, you know. It's the decentralising away from the humanity of the individual.
And I think because of the underlying hatred and discrimination against the types of people who were the majority of the early cases of HIV,
very early on, there was this public testimony that evolved.
And I've been joking with some of my friends with HIV that suddenly I'm becoming the expert patient.
And it's been, you know,
very interesting to watch friends of mine also kind of hesitate and eventually coming out and speaking about their life with the disease.
And that changes a complete narrative to bring a proximity,
because I think otherwise you have this concept of the tainted body that the dangerous Envisat.
Well, epidemic walking down the street, are they wearing a mask?
You know, we have very similar concept to the early days of HIV when people became aware that,
like Kofod was an asymptomatic phase, you couldn't know who was infected, wasn't like TB, where they might cough low for you.
So that this concept of personal testimony and making visible that the personal challenge seems to me to be a really significant similarity,
but also about, you know, trying to make visible what is hidden.
And another thing I feel very strongly about with pandemics and epidemics is they are spatial.
They are about place and time. And so, you know, having left a part of the country and having left South Africa,
where there very little cove that I'm flying into the centre of London, where there is a huge amount of Kofod,
I place myself in an area where when I finally ventured out to the park last week,
I was listening to a set of people talking to each other about their own experience of members of their family or themselves having virus.
And that's not going to be the case in other parts of the country or other parts of the world.
I think it's as I was trying.
I think this is this it highlights both the kind of what I often see as being the particular value and usefulness of history.
Right. We have when you're a historian, you have this luxury of distance, historical distance, which gives you the opportunity for reflection.
And one of the you know, I'm very hesitant to think that there actually are clear lessons that we can take from history.
But it often I think history is as good reminder that we're actually in the midst of this period of
uncertainty in which actually it's very hard to see because we're within our individual experience.
In some ways,
we're wrapped up within how this is unfolding as opposed to what historians might then see many years later when they're writing the narrative,
but also probably rewriting the narratives that we're forming right now.
I mean, I was struck by your point about location and.
Right. So its distance, it can be temporal distance, but also geographical distance, as I think I mentioned, when soon after lockdown started.
One of the things that I did as a historian, as opposed to kind of wanting to do something as a human,
but trying to think about what it is that historians can do to convey.
Mirror, who's the editor of Centaurus, an academic journal,
asked about Coedited special issue on thinking about the history of science medicine in the context of Cauvin 19.
And I was really struck by how when I asked contributors, we have 15 articles in total.
There is a sense of urgency from historians, anthropologists,
scholars wanting to write and to share about their expertise in the reflection within a very short period of time,
feeling like they had something to say and drawing on their careers and their
insights and trying to figure out how to formulate that for a broader audience,
perhaps a different kind of audience, an audience that might be more interested in what they had to say.
One of the articles comes from two anthropologists who work on Kenya, Wenzel Geissler, and with Prince, who I contacted.
And they were just in the midst of actually having to have left Kenya where they were doing fieldwork.
We're turning back to Oslo, where they're based for their institution and they immediately.
I have to say, I've been really touched throughout making a special issue by people's responses,
their willingness to write long after their work days.
But having this sense of urgency to try to record things and express what they
were seeing and Gaster Imprint's talk about how from the perspective of Kenya.
Covered 19 is part of one long epidemic. So we're in what we call the global north.
There's often it's been seen as a kind of upheaval of normal life, whereas in Kenya, there was Ebola.
There was cholera. It's interacting with an epidemic of tuberculosis, with cancer.
And so in many ways, the practises of surveillance of PPE, all of these things are being recycled from one epidemic to the next.
And so actually, it's about a kind of chronic long epidemic on the long JRA.
And so I was very struck by how that highlighted this difference and in time and geographic perspective,
but also, of course, helped us to rethink about. About these narratives. Right.
To rewrite them. I mean, I was I was struck you mentioned Robin right now as people are writing these obituaries of Kramer.
There are also, like you were saying, Dr. Fred, she's also kind of maybe rethinking his own version of what he remembered that happened.
Right. So also, within our own lifetime, we'll reflecting on what we remember happening and perhaps shaping them into a narrative.
Right. Narratives are also about us trying to make sense of things, which means that we're selecting evidence, perhaps highlighting other parts of it.
I don't that every one of the things that amused me, I mean,
there's been some very beautiful statements that he's made in a. a very touching interview in The New York Times today,
talking about how he loved Larry Kramer.
And yet, if you looked in through the window of the media, you would hear Larry Kramer denouncing him as the devil.
And they had this extraordinary relationship where they knew that they were playing a part in a role and
somehow personifying the conflict between the government neglect and the need of the patient who is dying.
And there is a real kind of resonances of history.
And indeed, the fact that when one hundred thousand Americans died of HIV, there wasn't even a proper attention paid to it.
It was, of course, that that awful milestone just past for Kofod 19.
So that's quite interesting. I was also bemused because in Kramer's own activism, he was not particularly a treatment person.
And yet, in fact, his recollection, he sees this massive change in the science of HIV coming about because of frame.
Now, it certainly was because of the movements act up the AIDS coalition to unleash power that fought so hard with the scientific establishment.
So certainly something he led, but not him as a person. But it's so much easier to choose to figureheads.
And I suppose as a feminist, one of my thoughts around this is, you know, how to make women visible from the earliest days of HIV.
I was in contact with women who were living with HIV, for whom it was often exceptionally complicated to be open about their HIV,
often because they feared and usually quite rightly, their children being taken away from them.
And in many contexts, women were sterilised or forced to have abortions if they wanted to, if they were pregnant.
And there was just shocking and abysmal, very direct abuse of women in the early days.
And it was frightening for many people to be open.
But over time, a remarkable set of women and a remarkable diversity of women, so to speak, out about their very diverse experiences of HIV.
And it was just so important to remain so important that that diversity of
narrative is there and that in different communities and different populations.
This is lived so differently. And I really love your example from Kenya.
And I've been fascinated watching different African countries respond in different ways and where
they've had a very inclusive response to HIV that's brought together communities and scientists.
They're doing the same thing in countries because that's how they know how to live.
So I find that really extraordinary. And I mean, if I may, one of the other thoughts I had when I was hearing you talk about about spaces.
There's a really great book that I love, which is a sort of memoir of her experience as an AIDS activist,
a woman called Sarah Schulman from the East Village in New York.
And she's written this beautiful book called The Gentrification of the Mind Witness to a Lost Imagination.
And really what she talks about is the lives that weren't lived and how that whole space of lower Manhattan changed because of the AIDS crisis.
And we're such a huge proportion of a local population, many of whom were young artists,
some great, some not so great at the beginning of their career. So many of them died.
And not only did we lose their creativity and their contribution to the arts, but also achieved the economic basis of that part of Manhattan changed.
And it got taken over by your yuppies because suddenly there were lots of apartments available and because gay men couldn't marry,
they didn't have the capacity to inherit their partners home when they passed away.
And since you know that the social political impacts of diseases are often quite hidden and change
our societies and much one on one thought I had and this I covered an interaction with Rich McKay,
who's written a wonderful book on the history of Patient Zero and this notion during the AIDS epidemic.
But one one thought that we, which I kept returning to is how in some ways we know these epidemics, that the high point of drama.
But there are, of course, just one point that sometimes distracts us from actually what's underneath.
So people who work on morbidity, thinking about sickness more broadly, often talk about morbidity, icebergs.
Right. How well you actually see is just the tip of an iceberg, which is very striking and dramatic.
But actually, of course, there's a much larger mass underneath and this is often what I feel.
We write about epidemics even in the past. That those are the momentous times that people record or bother to record.
But actually, of course, what they are is there are indicators about this larger movement underneath the kind of day to day illness.
The Day-To-Day lives affects a much broader part of society.
But that we have to dig down in some ways in order to record.
Now, I know that there will be questions from the audience and West is going to come return back to us in order to take us through some of this.
Hello. I am indeed. And there are indeed. Thanks so much for an amazing, amazingly rich array of points, questions, stories and so on.
I have a host of questions here. I will try and get through at least half of them, if I can, where you ended up really might be, where to start.
So this question of the sort of drama or the different shape of an epidemic at different moments in history,
earlier on, you talk about the beginning, the middle and end. Now, you took a nice bergens on there.
Different ways we can think about this. But a number of people have asked.
What's unusual or unexpected about this pandemic?
What is that what is there about this that you hadn't recognised or you hadn't seen coming?
So now it's an odd place to start. What can we not learn from history? But in a way, what what does what does this teach us?
That's unusual. Wolf, if anything.
Great question, Erica. You want to have a stab at it best, or am I going to?
I'm trying to think because because in some ways, of course, there's a tension here, right?
And there's been a there's a there's been a tendency amongst historians to actually say look at how epidemics are similar.
And partly they're similar because they're unexpected and they're uncertain and we don't know actually where we are.
And so it strikes me that, of course, that's a that's a very good point to keep in mind.
And perhaps that's what struck me actually, when I was reading I was rereading Rosenberg's essay from 1989,
and you talked about how AIDS was a postmodern epidemic, that it was happening in a context in which actually we had a lot of new scientific
research which was able to identify the virus and a kind of record short time.
And yet society was reflecting on it and it was unknown because modern societies don't usually deal with that.
And I've been struck by how we've actually been using the same rhetoric.
Am I right that people have been talking about, which is true, that we have this amazing amount,
the kind of phylogenetic information very fast, very impressive technology, the move towards vaccines.
And yet we again seem to be discussing how there's this there's something about
being in a modern society that should make us not have to deal with the unknown,
an unknown disease. And so I've been struck by how maybe what's interesting to me is that we haven't
actually retain that historical consciousness about unknowable uncertainties,
our inability to predict the future. I really agree with that.
And I think I was reading something on Kofod yesterday and I said,
because it's this ratkovic or is it about HIV in terms of exactly this point, about the acceleration.
And yet there are really interesting timelines looking at comparing Cavitt 19 with Saar's and if they were published a couple of months.
And if you can pair it with HIV, that the timelines are just extraordinary in terms of how I think scientists have stood on the shoulders
of previous epidemics and collaborated in a way that was a really massive struggle 40 years ago.
And so that there is that side of it, I suppose a couple of things that might be a little different.
The fact that we can't physically come together to respond.
So I have a kind of colleague and friend who's stuck in lockdown in in L.A. and he keeps saying,
but where are the activists that they can be together? And and I'm saying, well, they could be there in my echo chambers.
And social media is very different from the physical manifestation of rage that happened through things like active demonstrations and the
solidarity that you get from being in more than a virtual room with someone and being able to find connexions that that can grow more organically.
So I think the very fact of the way we are handling the pandemic is creating difference in terms of our ways of organising.
The other thing that I'm struck by, and I'm not sure whether it's a difference,
but I'm very struck by the way in which there's an expectation that the academic will go up,
the plateau will end, and the concept of the double dipping and the returning and the second wave, that seems almost inevitable.
That seems quite challenging. But as a historian, you may be able to tell me that there's been many examples of that before.
But it seems something we're very old prepared for.
Well, I might jump in here because precisely one of the questions is, so how did epidemics spend in the past?
There's a lot of talk about, you know, when we get this vaccine or when we get the tracking trace.
Right. Or whatever. How does an epidemic end or a pandemic?
And I mean, obviously, we can talk about AIDS is ongoing.
Right. And one of the interesting points I was think so.
I don't in terms of my research, in some ways, I don't work so much on epidemics.
I work on endemic disease. And to me, that's a very important distinction.
Right, that the the lack of the opposite of an epidemic is not a disease free world, but as endemic disease.
And what that basically means is disease that is normal, that we've accepted as being part of our life.
It doesn't mean that we don't fear the disease,
but it means that generally it's not it doesn't create a kind of social dislocation or economic dislocation.
So I think probably we can think about how it's true that the incidence of disease can decline.
But very often what we should think about is how disease comes to be accepted.
Certain types of diseases, perhaps we accept more than others.
Some forms of disease are more frightening to humans, but also we can think about how we accept disease in certain parts of the world.
And so disease, for example, can be. Malaria is endemic in some parts of the world.
But if it appeared in Europe or in England, we would see it as an epidemic disease because we would see it as a problem.
So I think the bigger question is, and this is why, as a historian,
I think it's important to remember that this is about defining what is a problem, which, of course.
Was central to the activism to do with AIDS.
When is that a problem? For whom is it a problem if it only affects a certain population?
Then do people not declare it an epidemic? So I think we're starting to get into these discussions.
Right. What happens if this becomes endemic? What if we see constant waves when it becomes a problem and then is no longer a problem?
But I think it's very important to recognise that this these are social political decisions.
This is not a kind of medical definition about when something is an epidemic and when it is not.
And I'd really like to build on that. And stemming from the epidemic, I know most of HIV is definitely not over.
And I find myself enraged by a lot of statements about ending AIDS or, you know,
I don't believe we're going to end AIDS is something quite unpleasant about
the idea that the only way we end date is if all people with AIDS don't lie.
And actually what we're looking at is how do we as a world, as well as individuals, live with the AIDS crisis?
And now how do we live with the Kofod epidemics on top of that?
And I suppose what does change is going from the crisis mentality to the normalising.
I think in terms of HIV, we're still not there with the normalising and in terms of the sort of the tools that get you there.
Well, partly it's about good science and treatments and the rest.
But it's also about smart behavioural interventions, integrating it culturally and understanding of people being a part of society.
And I still think it's quite fascinating having hope if there's a sense that you should run away and hide and isolate.
And then when you come back out. When am I allowed to be a part of society?
Yeah, I know that question also came up at building on what you were talking about right at beginning your discussion.
Aramic the question of shame. And of course,
if is going to move to a sort of living with rather than getting rid of somehow the discourse around the
narrative around shame or having a shameful disease or being somehow tainted body has got to shift.
Do you feel that konbit has produced sort of shamefulness amongst people who have it?
I do. And it's been quite a curious journey.
And one of the pieces that I wrote, I spoke about how uncomfortable I felt that people kept asking me how I got it.
And if someone so over informed and who'd been writing about it, had I done something wrong.
And when I was chatting with a friend with HIV, she really recognised that because she hates the language.
How did you get infected? It's no one's business. The challenge is her living with it in her body.
And I do believe and agree, and I've talked with many about this,
that the stigma of acquiring a sexual disease or predominantly sexual diseases is much greater.
But let's be clear. Kove, it is true that some really weird safe sex advice that says wash your hands and you won't get covered.
Let's be clear. Intimate contact is is part of the problem.
But that in terms of the stigma around it, I think part of the driver is if you look at the public messaging and again,
we saw the same thing in HIV, it's all about avoiding this disease.
And with one in six of us in London having been or currently living with Kofod, there is no information.
There is no way of me finding out if I'm infectious and can safely go to the park.
I'm just told I can leave the house up seven days. Where do I find out?
I mean, I always think this is the kind of interesting point narrative's in some ways that we've set out about agency.
So you can write around narrative. But of course, the flip side, the agency has responsibility.
And I think this would be part of the point of having a narrative of of being a patient with
agency also means there's a notion that you're also therefore responsible for your health destiny.
And I actually wonder, you know, this isn't just about disease. I think it's about a broader way in which we approach notions of health.
And I think especially in Western culture, this is a long history.
Notions of the terminology, the concept of contagion and infection are about pollution.
And so the quarantine and all these other words have these roots in the notion of being purified and being able to rejoin society.
But I also think this is not just about infectious disease.
When we talk about health and people being unhealthy, we assume a kind of agency which can be very positive and enabling.
But of course, it also has its flipside, which is that you're responsible for your ill health or your state of ill health.
And it's it should therefore theoretically be within your control to fix that.
So I think this is a fundamental concept within Western by.
Agency is, of course, multiply valence, though, I mean, the shift from stay at home to stay alert is,
of course your now to blame for if anything goes wrong with you from one perspective.
And one of the questions that people are asking is, is again,
another difference between the so-called social construction of covered and the narrative
around AIDS around the perception is who is vulnerable to contracting the disease?
It goes back to your question about sex, Robin.
But it's also about the aged, the elderly, the sort of dangerously old and so on as a kind of fetish figure within this narrative.
Do any of you do either we have anything to say about that? I yes, absolutely.
I mean, I think that there is this sort of, again, the lack of attention to what those of us who have it might be the lack of access to testing.
I mean, I've tried repeatedly to get tested and I've completely given up.
The only way I can get tested is to pay a remarkable amount of money to a private provider.
So there's sort of this sense in which I ought to be able to protect because I know I have this.
And yet nobody is helping me access the resources to do this.
I think there's also this sort of it speaks, again, to my point about equal opportunities and yet the stratification at various levels.
So sort of the angry over 70 saying how dare you try and shield me when there's a very, you know, reasonable epidemiological argument.
But it's not being nuanced and layered with the variety of what we know.
And there's a certain, you know, the simplicity of messages that might help people to vote in a certain way are not
messages that will then help us to take agency and make wise decisions of our lives.
And that's part of what we did learn in HIV, was actually developing stories and musicals and plays and books and,
you know, this whole cultural conversation that emerged. And I think here, because of our dislocation from each other,
because as well-intentioned as they are, virtual concerts don't quite have the same impact.
We've not really developed a powerful cultural, conversational and Kofod beyond the absolutely wonderful means that I keep receiving on my own.
I mean, I think and I think isn't this again, this comes to the heart of disease in general,
which is that if they are susceptible groups always that are going to be more susceptible.
And whether it's because of biological differences or whether it's because of living situations.
So and there's various things that are within the individual's control and not.
But I think if we look at the long view of history, disease always throws up these differences within society,
whether they be economic, whether they be physical. Right.
And I think this is why to me, it's always an important reminder that disease is part of society.
This is not simply a biological thing that's somehow separate from it.
It acts within societies. It takes into account forms of human communication.
Right. Our practises that we see now that are shifting, no more handshakes, no more kissing on the cheeks.
But it also takes into account how societies are structured. And so this is why it's able to eliminate so many of these structural functions,
things in the past as well as today as has often happened on these Thursday talks.
Your recent answer has just responded to a number of questions that have come up around structural inequality and around the degree to which disease,
like from what you said right at the beginning, is a kind of it is itself a symptom of structural inequality as much as anything.
And this question of sort of learning to understand the disease and is part of the social world raises two different questions, it seems to me.
One is. So from someone go, Michelle, will this curtail megacities?
Are we now going to be differently socially organised in the future? Let's start with that one.
To go with American troops? Well, I mean, I think the historian in me says never predict.
Right. Because history littered with with people who've tried to predict.
And maybe that is part of my answer. Right. Because the very interesting point is that these things provide us with opportunities.
But they I don't think that an epidemic or disease in some ways provides us with firm direction.
Right. And I think, again, it's a very interesting point that we often think this is just about a biological agent,
but it's also about human responses to that biological agent. There's a number of responses that we can take.
We might end up just taking one and not being able to see that there were other options available.
And this is very often where I think history comes in to kind of remind us that somewhere back there,
there were many paths to choose from and perhaps we didn't even notice them.
So I think the point is that these can reopen questions. They might have us reflect upon things.
But that isn't necessarily inherent in the disease itself.
I think it's it's up to us as humans to take on those decisions.
A couple of reflections bouncing off that, I mean,
I think many people are predicting that we will endeavour to find ways to live more spatially separate from each other.
And yet just glancing at the images of beaches in the past few days and people, you know,
saying with great kind of pride that we are socially distanced and they also patently not.
And it looks to me like some of the worst days in Brighton. That's it.
So there's this kind of concept of the fantasy of how we're going to live differently.
And the reality in terms of pursuing our individual agency,
that I think more fundamentally in terms of this question of structural inequality is one of the things I'm really
conscious of is the position of privilege with which we look at this question of how we're going to reorganise our world.
And if we just think about the meat industry and, you know, some of the most vulnerable workers on our planet,
other people forced into factories where the noise is so high work that they do not have the
capacity to physically distance from each other where they're required to speak at high volume,
therefore making the likelihood of contamination so much greater.
Construction workers outside my front door and so on and so forth. I mean, we know the professions that are most at risk.
And in addition to all those people, nobody thinking they are two metres from the next picture.
To what extent are they thinking about the toilet attendants,
the parking attendants and all those people who don't have the control, the protective equipment to protect themselves?
So I absolutely agree with the fact that this is exposing that the lines of structured inequality and I
must say one of the the joys I have is reading the weekly report from the Office for National Statistics.
I don't know who is running that, but they're doing a spectacular job at helping us see how any clue this epidemic is in this country.
And the range of ways in which that happens. That takes us back, in a way, to the question of who speaks for the patient.
And what you're now suggesting, I think, is that the patient is not just the people who are living with covered in their own bodies,
but more broadly that are kind of a broader set of people that you might think of as
the patient if this disease is demonstrating something about structural inequality.
And it's an old idea that the person who's telling the best narrative about the patient as a person is putting the onus statistics together.
But but, you know, it takes it takes all sorts.
And in time, I guess we'll have our plays or operas are our pieces of music that tell us more about this period.
On that score, somebody was grateful. Allison said, thank you for mentioning class.
Thank you for mentioning Rosenberg's work. Are there other people that you would recommend?
In other words, can we have a reading left, please?
Or a minable reading list as to who to read on this crisis and on the relationship between now and AIDS?
Or or on pandemics more broadly? Other than your forthcoming memoir, Robert.
I mean, there are many books. I mean, I think I should hand to the academic on that.
But you know that there are many stories that were books that were written in the early epidemic that I would really encourage people to look at.
I mean, what is the policing desire to really understand how epidemics situate themselves?
There are great memoirs of HIV.
I did Francis book have survived and survived the Plague or Peter Piltz book reflecting on both HIV and Ebola could no time to lose.
So, I mean, there are many and I'm very happy to make my shortlist available.
But Eric. I think you've got a much better list. Well, I was going to say I'm happy to.
So as people are now, the special issues about to come out and it's it'll be openly available online.
And so there's obviously there'll be fifteen articles for people to read. But of course, a lot of those articles, some are written.
So we have a range of scholars in terms of early in their career, later in their career.
And of course,
a lot of them will be citing some classic work and a lot of them are referring back to that classic work to kind of rethink some of that.
So John Henderson, who's written these wonderful things on plague in in France, Italy,
and so to have his perspective on who's been writing about quarantine within this context and then suddenly to have it breached the public,
we a wonderful colleague, Margaret Spelling here at Oxford, who's emeritus and working through with her.
She she wrote a really wonderful article on endemic disease.
And I think for someone who's been who spent a career writing about the history of disease, 19th century cholera,
and then to suddenly have this pandemic unfold and then to be able to come back to your work and write on it,
not necessarily with explicit reference to cover 19, but I think suddenly with a kind of return to the urgency of the ideas that they want to capture.
And I do think you can have a kind of long doray that might help us to to think about what's new, what's not new, but also in some ways to remove us.
Because I do think to have that distance when we're in the immediacy to try to think about what's different, what might be the same is very useful.
So be very happy to post that,
as well as a question of the readings that we've been doing in this reading group with the students, which really I have to say,
these are readings that I've been teaching for 10, 15 years,
including to some of the students where apparently they don't remember reading them, you know, a few terms ago.
But I think now in the midst of in the midst of the pandemic, they know things that you think,
why why are we reading this old text about history of disease? Suddenly it comes alive to you and you way.
So very happy to have that on the website.
I mean, on that score, I was working on a translation piece of a number of colleagues from French that about touch on the history of touch.
And people were sort of very originally when we first article we've got about a month ago.
Now everybody's going, oh, yeah, touch. It's so important. And so, of course, we come to new understandings of our own bodies through this as well.
We're running almost out of time. But this time, I think for two or three more questions, if you've still got the energy and the time for it.
The first one is about the role of the press conferences and the daily briefings and the sort of the degree.
I mean, there's two ways of thinking about this. It seems to me coming from the questions. Some people are saying these are enormously helpful.
And isn't it interesting that now we believe an expert again when they were supposedly not believed in a while back?
Others are saying this is just a distraction from what's really going on.
Whether that's about poverty, discrimination,
the kind of social element of disease that we've been talking about or whether it's sort of a political part of political theatre.
And that's all it is. Can I invite you to reflect on either of those things?
Well, my personal and I'm really glad that whoever asked these questions asked them,
because I'm quite fascinated by me in terms of it being this epidemiological scientific narrative.
And I mean, many public health friends have been commenting about the way in which everybody suddenly overnight an epidemiologist.
And there's something quite touching about the fact that you hear counsellors in in distant parts of the country talking about the number,
which was something that, you know, very few people understood what the our number was even two months ago.
So it's quite wonderful, this sort of expansion of knowledge around this.
But it's also in terms of narratives creates a story which is the story of epidemiology and health in a very narrow concept.
And I was struck about a statement by Caroline Noakes, who was questioning the prime minister yesterday from a gender perspective,
and she's been quite hammered for the fact that she spoke about child care.
She took it, talked about women's impact, the impact of the epidemic on women in terms of women.
Being furloughed for longer, having less access to employment,
and she was being hammered by male politicians saying why you're not talking about the fact that women are dying.
And so it seems as if what we want through the ways in which at least the scientific component
to this is going is to maintain a narrative which is about the numbers of people infected,
the numbers and the amount of disease, rather than this much broader, more complex narrative of our societies changing.
I mean, I would I would definitely pick up on that, because one that I have is.
Epidemics, outbreaks of disease are always a period when people are very hungry for information.
And so you have large amounts of information circulating. This is true in the past, as in today.
But whether that knowledge, whether that information is to be relied upon.
I actually think we have an right as we have this notion that somehow now we have all these forms of media.
So we're going to know what's going on. But I'm often struck by how we still have more information.
And it's not clear if that information is any more trustworthy.
And that actually we might be in a very similar situation to periods in the past in which we have this desire that we can't fill.
But also to pick on Robin's point about numbers. So one of the things I work on is the history of numbers.
And of course,
numbers very often are brought up during times of war and during times of disease because numbers give us this reassurance of certainty.
Both war and epidemics tend to be periods of crisis and great uncertainty.
And I think we want to think about whether or not those numbers actually do provide anything tangible.
So I think there's this amazing way in which the Johns Hopkins dashboard has those numbers in red.
And yet, what actually are the numbers of cases telling us? Like Robin is saying, this is actually a very complex narrative.
And to turn it into one about numbers might be trying to reassure us that we can we can predict and that we know where we are when when we might not.
Now, just bouncing on that, you know, when my personal obsessions is this whole problem with testing and the lack of access to testing,
which is agitating me massively before I even try to find my way through the system personally.
But, you know, the back calculations that came out last week suggest that one point five million
people in this country have already acquired the virus and yet the numbers.
But many, many, many miles away from that. And so, of course, you know, it's always, you know, you look you find what you look for.
And if you're not looking, you don't find.
And most likely, if you tested me today, you wouldn't find virus because it's only transiently in the body from what we know.
And so we're never going to be able to have an accurate data.
And yet there was a fantasy that's being created by all these charts that we do have that knowledge and that we can compare ourselves with others.
And of course, you know what what gets counted, what gets measured, gets done.
And there is a long history and really quite a sad history still at the w.h of the lack of data disaggregated by gender and by gender,
I mean not by sex, so that we never have adequate consent, you know,
information on how different genders are affected by different diseases, how different age groups is.
The data that is presented is as good as the data that is put in.
And it's extremely limited, particularly in countries with fewer resources.
I mean, one, I'll just say very quickly what one might think about this is, of course, numbers also are a narrative, right?
I think very often we've been talking as if narratives have to do with this kind of positive version.
But actually, I always think it's important to remember that they, too, are a narrative.
They to tell their own version of a story with some hearts left out.
That's exactly what I was going to say anyway.
And perhaps one more thing, which is a recurrent metaphor that's run through our discussions every now and then.
Robin, you even apologised for it at one point. Is the militaristic narrative.
And I, again, would invite you to reflect on that as a final thing.
And in particular, perhaps, again, the kind of agency that that militaristic narrative distribute,
whether that's in relation to gender or in relation to technology or,
you know, how what kind of agency is implied by a narrative of a battle, a war against this,
you know, opposing force that's coming into our lives, et cetera, et cetera?
I think it's a it's been such a troublesome concept in the area of HIV.
And it's it's rearing its head again here. And quite fascinating in terms of the whole world is at war with this virus.
We're no longer at war with each other. And yet this concept is, you know, are you a bad person if you don't manage to battle through and survive?
You know, we'll put it in the moral statements about winning the war against a virus and how, you know,
how do we wage war on something which is a pathogen that is affecting societies in a variety of ways.
I think I think that's a very simple side of creating the good and the bad.
And the victorious person who drinks hydroponic chlorine daily is not going to get infected with this.
And yeah, I think you've thought a lot about it in the locate circle perspective, would you, Erica?
I was going to say, because, of course, I work on the history of war as well as this rare disease.
And I suppose what is fascinating to me is war is also a complex social phenomena.
Right. And and we also have different cultural approaches to understanding whether we think or as a normal part of life,
as many people dead and the premodern period and whether we think it's an unacceptable part of life, which is abnormal.
So I think what's also interesting is in some ways, we're trying to reach for metaphors,
for concepts that themselves are still complex and bound up with our own social assumptions,
which is an indication of of what we're trying to deal with them, perhaps that there's not a straightforward solution or even an easy way to discuss.
Thank you. I think we should bring things towards a close.
And start by saying thank you to our brilliant speakers, Eric and Robin, for a wonderful session this evening.
And a big thank you to to all our viewers and listeners at home for watching, listening and for your comments and questions.
I'm sorry if we didn't quite have time to get to all of them, but I hope you will feel like I do that.
We've all learnt a great deal and every now and then had a bit of fun as well this evening from this evening's discussion.
So thank you once again, Erica. And thank you, Robin.
Everyone else, please do come back to the big tent for next week's live event.
On Thursday, the 4th of June at 5:00 p.m.,
we'll be joined by Professor Katherine Cole from the mediaeval Amun Languages Faculty here in Oxford and Rajinder Dederer,
professor of cultural studies and creative industries at Birmingham City University.
Together, they'll be discussing creative multilingualism as part of next week's theme languages.
You've all given your own time, your thoughts, your questions and your engagement as we come together online.
This series would not be possible without the support from so many people, including the so-called backstage talk torch team.
And I'm grateful to them, too. For now, then. Thank you, everyone, and goodbye.