CHRONIC LIFE: CAN WE GO THE DISTANCE WITH THE VIRUS?
A Roundtable Webinar with Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr, Lorie Novak, & Meghan O’Rourke
Moderated by Laura Wexler and Eilin Perez
Tuesday, September 27, 4:00 – 5:30 PM ET
The pandemic is far from over, vaccination is imperfect, long-covid is a significant threat, politics plays hardball with our lives, we are underprepared for the horizon of other viruses, consequences are vastly unequally distributed, and we are likely to be anxious, in denial, and puzzled about how best to respond. In this Roundtable, four prominent artists and scholars will present art and organizing strategies drawn from lived experience with chronic illness, community activism, and the personal and political demands long-hauling presents.
Videomaker and scholar Alexandra Juhasz and writer Theodore Kerr, co-authors of a new book, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, will discuss the necessarily multiple time frames of long-time HIV/AIDS activism.
Artist Lorie Novak will share and discuss Migraine Register, her durational photographic commitment to making visible the significant impact of this chronic and pervasive but invisible condition.
Writer Meghan O’Rourke, Editor of The Yale Review and author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness will consider the challenge of narrating auto-immune and other poorly understood illness when no coherent story readily appears.
Moderated by historian Laura Wexler, Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University and Co-chair of Yale Public Humanities, and Eilin Perez, Postdoctoral Associate, Department of History and Yale Public Humanities.
Sponsored by The Henry R. Luce Foundation, The ZipCode Memory Project , Center for the Study of Social Difference and the Society of Fellows/Heymann Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, and Yale Public Humanities.