In the early days of HIV/AIDS in North America, those most directly affected by the crisis created a social movement to respond to the virus when no one else would. The legacy of activists’ efforts can be seen in the more than seventy-five AIDS service organizations (ASOs) that provide prevention, support, and education to communities across Ontario today. While these organizations were once an important site of advocacy and resistance for people living with HIV/AIDS (PHAs), ASOs are now often viewed as professionalized, bureaucratic and impersonal spaces. Linking theoretical understandings of public pedagogy and the pedagogical potential of space with HIV/AIDS scholarship, I offer a conception of ASOs as more than simply impersonal service providers, but vibrant spaces of community learning. Drawing on interviews with people who work, volunteer, and use services at a small ASO in Kingston, Ontario called HIV/AIDS Regional Services (HARS), I identify three pedagogical assets within the agency’s space that tend to go unrecognized as such. The agency’s drop-in space, artworks created by PHAs that decorate the walls of the office, and HARS’ storefront design are not usually counted as elements of the kind of formal “HIV/AIDS education” that ASOs provide. However, by exploring the learning experiences that are incited by these assets, I argue that we may broaden our understandings of what counts as HIV/AIDS education and of the value of ASOs in their communities. These unacknowledged assets not only enhance peoples’ understanding of issues related to HIV/AIDS, they also work to develop a sense of community and belonging for visitors to the space. In conclusion, I reiterate that while today’s ASOs are surely different than the organizations that activists created in the 1980s, the learning experiences that arise in agencies like HARS demonstrate that community-building and mutual support can remain as integral aspects of ASOs. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-20 14:39:55.828

yes / This paper provides an overview of the literature on AIDS activism, stigma, and violence. The literature on AIDS activism, stigma and violence discussed suggests that the physical, emotional and social violence that AIDS as a disease, and stigma as a social construct tied to that disease, can be turned into an empowering experience that joins HIV positive people in productive and constructive networks, that this empowerment fundamentally changes one¿s identity, and that such disease-based identities are reshaping notions of citizenship around the globe. This hypothesis is built, however, on theory and on experiences in a) richer countries with a completely different epidemiology than that of sub-Saharan Africa, b) a highly politicised and activist country such as South Africa, and on c) initial ethnographic evidence from West African countries. Although this seems enough evidence to tentatively observe a trend, we need far more evidence from diverse contexts if this transformative potential is to be explored to the full. The paper concludes by drawing out a research agenda.

This project is an archival case study of the multimedia artist and writer David Wojnarowicz. I discuss Wojnarowicz's legacy as a queer activist and public intellectual to explore the potential of his posthumous rhetorical agency. I define "posthumous rhetorical agency" as a process enacted by the living to facilitate the participation of the deceased in public life. I emphasize that developing a theory of posthumous rhetorical agency can fuel the "momentum of the archival turn" while also deepening a "commitment to the queer turn" in rhetorical studies (Morris and Rawson; Crichton). I establish that Wojnarowicz's archive possesses the ability to reach into the future with remarkable velocity to contribute to his posthumous agency because he drew on extant queer kinship networks and engaged multiple mediums as a visual artist, writer, musician, performance artist, and filmmaker. I extend Avery Gordon's position that haunting differs from trauma because haunting produces a "something-to-be-done" quality, which leads to an engagement with the present and a desire "to reveal and learn from subjugated knowledge." I argue that Wojnarowicz's legacy has a "something-to-be-done" quality about it. His legacy stands as an indictment of a nation lulled into apathetic indifference and cowed into fear of social difference: at a national level when the AIDS epidemic began, politicians and corporations were inexcusably slow to respond because the disease was assumed to infect only gay men and other "high risk" populations. Thus, in understanding Wojnarowicz's suffering - as an individual and, to take this line of argument further, as part of a collective of people with AIDS who died due to the US government's neglect of a public health crisis from which the "general public" was assumed to be safe - one can conceive of his posthumous legacy as a positive and needful presence that calls attention to the value of integrating a partially erased or forgotten history more fully into the nation's history. I conclude that a viable theory of posthumous rhetorical agency must attend to issues of how to responsibly and justly represent the work of those who have been systematically excluded, censored, or erased from the historical record.