5. How visual representation in both the arts and sciences is critical for advancing important ideas about HIV/AIDS.

Transcription

1 Welcome to Week 5 Ø Please watch the online video (51 seconds). Over the past four weeks, you have learned: 1. How to do a basic analysis of literary and scientific texts. 2. How scientists and artists create knowledge. 3. About the scientific and artistic history of HIV/AIDS. 4. How language, both scientific and artistic, shapes our ideas about HIV/AIDS. 5. How visual representation in both the arts and sciences is critical for advancing important ideas about HIV/AIDS. Week Five, which we have entitled "People Matter", will continue the exploration of ways of reading we began in Week Three and continued into Week Four. Now, we will look at how understanding individual experiences of HIV/AIDS is important. 1. You will learn why thinking about HIV/AIDS as an individual experience matters. 2. You will learn about the experiences of youth and clinicians when we interview Dr. Stephen Arpadi, and discuss with him what it was like to treat pediatric patients in the early days of HIV/AIDS. 3. You will learn how drug development radically changed the HIV/AIDS landscape and the individual experience of living with HIV. 4. You will read the play "The Date," about a man who has lived into middle age with HIV/AIDS. We will talk to the playwright Joan Lipkin about why she created the work, and how it reflects the experience of living long term with HIV/AIDS. 1

2 5. We will talk about another cultural artifact, TLC's video for "Waterfalls," and discuss how it portrays the individual experience of HIV/AIDS in popular music in the days before HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy). 6. Now that you have chosen and prepared your own cultural artifact for our online exhibition, you will learn how to upload your artifact to the Omeka platform we are using to collect the artifacts in one place. So now, let's turn our attention to people: how does understanding the personal experience of HIV/AIDS shape our evolving thought about the pandemic? Why do people matter? 5.1 Learning the Lived Experience of HIV/AIDS The video that follows introduces Week Five in a little more depth. In watching it, you will learn the following: Dave and Ann will introduce the concept of "Patient Zero" and discuss why paying attention to the individual experience with HIV matters. You'll be reminded of what different lived experiences with HIV/AIDS we will be discussing this week: that of young people who lived with HIV, as well as that of people who have lived for several years, even decades, with HIV. You'll learn more about other individual experiences with HIV through posting a personal story or question. Ø Please watch the online video (3 minutes, 21 seconds). Living With AIDS This class has explored words and images associated with HIV/AIDS. But there s also the very real, very personal experience of HIV/AIDS. 2

3 This unit focuses on the lived experience and how that lived experience can be perceived and presented in various ways. One well-known example of how the lived experience can be presented in different ways is the concept of patient zero. The concept is very useful for clinicians and epidemiologists for understanding the transmission of viruses. But from a cultural critic s standpoint, the concept can be quite troublesome. Being identified as patient zero can be a way to vilify or oppress people. This unit continues to look at the complexities of the lived experiences with HIV/AIDS. Ø Please complete the assigned reading. Ø Please complete the online quiz and contribute to the online Discussion Board. 5.2 Interview with AIDS researcher Dr. Stephen Arpadi In this section, you will watch an interview of Dr. Stephen Arpadi, a Columbia University physician and researcher who treated infants and young children with HIV/AIDS in the early days of the epidemic. Watch the video and think about Dr. Arpadi's description of what it meant to treat these individuals then as children and now as young adults. You will be asked to share your own thoughts in the discussion. Ø Please watch the online video (14 minutes, 25 seconds). Interview with Dr. Stephen Arpadi Ann and Dave meet with Dr. Stephen Marx Arpadi to discuss his work in mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Dr. Marx Arpadi received his 3

4 M.D. from George Washington University in Washington, DC and is a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at Columbia University. He also specialized in pediatric HIV/AIDS. Dr. Marx Arpadi was working during the time that it became clear that if women were treated during pregnancy, viral transmission to the children decreased significantly. Dr. Marx Arpadi helped put together programs to encourage more treatment during pregnancy. It has been extremely successful in the US, to the point where there are barely any mother-to-child transmissions today. There are currently several initiatives trying to get the same treatment that is available in the US more readily accessible globally, specifically in the less affluent parts of the world. Dr. Marx Arpadi then goes on to discuss the current difficulties of living with HIV/AIDS. He has many patients who were diagnosed during a time when having HIV/AIDS was essentially a death sentence. But many of them are now well along into their 30s. It s a unique difficulty, living a life you were not expected to live. Ø Please complete the assigned reading. Ø Please contribute to the online Discussion Board. 5.3 Drug Development and HIV/AIDS The development of various antiretroviral drugs and, especially, highly active antiretroviral therapy, has changed dramatically the HIV/AIDS landscape. As Dr. Arpati noted, we now can largely prevent mother-tochild transmission of the virus. And as we'll see in the next section, the available treatment options now allow individuals with HIV to live longer, healthier lives. In this video, we will briefly discuss some of these developments. After wartching the video, you should: Understand more about the major classes of antiretroviral drugs. Know the general chronology of the development of these drugs. 4

5 Better understand how the development of these drugs has changed the HIV/AIDS landscape. Ø Please watch the online video (2 minutes, 13 seconds). Drug Development and HIV/AIDS Drug development has had a very dramatic impact on the HIV/AIDS landscape. It has greatly reduced rates of mother-to-child transmission and helped people today live longer and healthier lives. AZT, the first antiretroviral drug, was approved in the mid 1980s. This drug inhibits the enzyme reverse transcriptase and decreases the rate of viral replication. But it wasn t a particularly effective drug. In the 1990s a new class of drugs, protease inhibitors, were approved for use. These drugs inhibit protease, another essential enzyme of the virus. They were much more effective in reducing the rate of replication. Additionally, clinicians began employing not just monotherapy, but combination therapy. This was called the triple drug cocktail, where three drugs are simultaneously administered. Combination therapy proved to be highly effective at reducing viral load and was often referred to as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy, or HAART. With drug development, a new issue has emerged: how does one live with HIV? Ø Please complete the online quiz. 5.4 What does it mean to have lived with HIV/AIDS for decades? In this section, we will discuss a short play by an artist who we met earlier in the course: playwright, director, and activist Joan Lipkin. The play is entitled "The Date." After reading the script and watching a performance of the play, you will watch a short interview with Joan where we discuss it with her. Think about her comments on why 5

6 she created a work about a man who has lived into middle age with HIV/AIDS. You will be asked to share your own thoughts about how the work reflects the experience of living long term with HIV/AIDS. Ø Please complete the assigned reading. Ø Please watch the assigned video clip (8 minutes, 53 seconds). Ø Please contribute to the online Word Cloud. Ø Please watch the online video (4 minute, 57 seconds). Interview: Joan Lipkin on her play The Date Ann and Dave meet again with Joan Lipkin to discuss her short play, The Date. It is a piece that addresses an older generation and the loss they have experienced from HIV/AIDS. While earlier pieces about HIV/AIDS served mostly as a call to action, later pieces, like The Date, take more time to explore the emotional side of surviving and living with HIV/AIDS. Ø Please contribute to the online Discussion Board. 5.5 Cultural Artifact #5: Waterfalls by TLC In this section, you will look at a music video for the song "Waterfalls" released by the group TLC in You will then watch a cultural artifact discussion where we discuss with students how this video portrays the lived experience of HIV/AIDS. Why was this a video important for its time, particularly before the advance of HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) in 1996? You will offer an initial response to this video through contributing to a word cloud, then extend that response in a discussion forum. In this way, you will continue to deepen the ways you can approach analyzing a representation of HIV/AIDS by thinking about why this representation of the lived experience of HIV/AIDS matters. 6

7 In the next section, watch the video for "Waterfalls," then go on to watch the cultural artifact discussion that follows. Ø Please watch the assigned video clip (5 minutes, 15 seconds). Ø Please watch the online video (11 minutes, 24 seconds). Cultural Artifact Discussion: Waterfalls by TLC Dave and Ann invite two Davidson College students, Julie Coursen and Charlotte Marx-Arpadi, to partake in a discussion about this week s cultural artifact. Julie is a senior Biology major and Julie is a junior Biology major. The cultural artifact is the music video for the song Waterfalls by TLC. The song came out in 1995 and spent seven weeks as the number one song. Ø Please contribute to the online Word Cloud. Ø Please contribute to the online Discussion Board. 5.6 Creating Meaning in your Online Exhibit: Social, Cultural, Scientific Context In this section of the course, you will learn the following: 1. You will see us model for you how we described the cultural artifacts we uploaded into the online exhibit. This will help give you examples of how to tell the story of your artifact. You can also look at these entries online at Look for the entries "International AIDS Conference Delegate's Bag" and "'Live, Love, Condomize!' Handheld Paper Fan." 2. You will upload and curate your cultural artifact. Ø Please watch the online video (3 minute, 39 seconds). 7

8 Ann and Dave s Artifacts Ann and Dave share their chosen cultural artifacts and explain how they uploaded them into the class exhibit. Hopefully their introduction will give you a better sense of how to fill out some of the required fields when you upload your cultural artifact onto the platform Ø Please watch the online video (3 minute, 54 seconds). Cultural Artifact Tutorial Kristen Eshleman, a technologist at Davidson College, walks through how to use the Omeka tool, which is the platform for the class exhibit. One important thing to remember is that any information you enter will go into the back end of the system for approval. So don t worry if your artifact doesn t go public right away. Please complete the end of the week survey. 8