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"What is Remembered Lives": The Spatio-Temporal Disruption of Archiving AIDS on Instagram

Date:
Location:
Classroom Building Room 122
Speaker(s) / Presenter(s):
Marika Cifor, University of Washington

Marika Cifor’s talk focuses on how archiving HIV/AIDS on Instragram offers powerfully disruptive potential for addressing and redressing the injustices that characterize the contemporary American HIV/AIDS epidemic. By mobilizing Instagram’s spatio-temporal affordances, The AIDS Memorial account holds unique promise for repoliticizing HIV/AIDS. Even as representations on The AIDS Memorial sometimes extend endemic AIDS time’s normalizing registers and abet structural domination, this Instrgram archive profoundly alters the temporal rhythm of social relations in lived time. The Memorial produces immediacy in two ways to rupture normative AIDS time: affective immediacy by circulating crowdsourced images and stories, and spatio-temporal immediacy by manipulating Instagram’s geotagging functionalities. The AIDS Memorial exposes, beyond the tight bounds of AIDS communities, the continued immediacy of HIV/AIDS in the times and spaces the privileged also occupy. Reigniting urgency around AIDS can improve the lives and life chances of people living with HIV/AIDS, and bolster memory transmission and intergenerational exchange in queer communities.