Paper short abstract:

What shape the storytelling process in a collaborative project about HIV? Through a close examination of ‘This is my Face’ (Cabezas Pino, 2019), I examine the tensions and opportunities of collaborative storytelling processes when working with people living with HIV.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I examine the process of autobiographical HIV storytelling as an active practice of resistance. People living with HIV in Chile define the time of diagnosis as the starting point of a long-term ‘fracture’, in which a revelation about the body takes place through pointing to the presence of a virus that cannot be reversed. If a diagnosis is the starting point of this biographical disruption, the process of learning how to live with HIV is a continuous form of autopoietic storytelling. This is a process in which body, mind and self are intertwined and re-shaped by their ability to narrate themselves in order ‘to articulate and resolve core, universal problems’ and as ‘a way to avoid or heal biographical discontinuities’ (Becker, 1997, p. 25), but more importantly as strategic practice to make sense of what they are going through.

I critically draw on my experiences of working on ´This is my Face: Audio-visual practice as collaborative sense-making among men living with HIV in Chile” to understand the sense-making processes around the biographical disruption caused by HIV and its consequences in how the world is reconfigured. I will examine the implementation of a novel autobiographical audiovisual method, named ‘collaborative mise en Scène’ to suggest that creative storytelling processes respond to a larger array of tensions, strategic interventions and alliances, beyond the ‘I’ and ‘You’ of the inter-subjective encounter.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I approach stories about chemsex as told during the ethnographic interview as risk narratives, rather than as reflections of the ‘truth’ of sexualized drug use. These narratives can be understood as cautionary tales that inspire individual and collective efforts at harm reduction.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an exploration of a methodological challenge that arose from my doctoral research on chemsex scenes in urban India. Due to the ethical and legal limitations on ‘participant observation’ in queer subcultures of sexualized drug use, I relied almost exclusively on ethnographic interviews with interlocutors who tended to stress the negative physical and mental health outcomes of chemsex. How might we make sense of such narratives without resorting to what proponents of ‘critical chemsex studies’ argue are pathologizing and stigmatizing approaches to chemsex as always both resulting from and in trauma (Møller & Hakim 2021)? The paper revolves around the devastating story of Arvind, who lost his partner to addiction-related suicide and contracted HIV through his own involvement in Mumbai’s ‘high fun’ or chemsex scene. Drawing on the conceptualization of illness narratives (Kleinman 1988) in medical anthropology, I propose to treat such stories as narratives of risk that function not just as a way of satisfying the researcher and their (presumed) public health agenda, but also as attempts at reflection and healing. Moreover, chemsex stories – and particularly chemsex stories involving suicides - generate an affective urgency (Chatterjee 2018) that animates both individual and collective efforts at harm reduction, articulated as the desire to do ‘something’ before it is too late. Yet in the process of converting singularly tragic stories like Arvind’s into a generic perception of risk (including through gossip), the specific personal and structural factors that shape vulnerability in the context of chemsex are elided.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from fieldwork with the South African National Blood Service, I examine the differing language ideologies and health communicative inequities that inform the stories people tell about race and blood donation, with attention to the friction between narrative truths and factual accuracy.

Paper long abstract:

A South African National Blood Service (SANBS) campaign #NoStereotypes aims to combat prejudices about who can donate blood: “Everyone has the right to be themselves and to be treated equally. It doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside, you have the gift to save someone with what’s on the inside.” Although one can donate blood regardless of race, a story persists in South Africa that the blood service “threw black people’s blood away” even after apartheid. As I learned through ethnographic fieldwork with SANBS, according to blood service officials, this is patently false. Until 2005, they did not ban black donors but rather used race as one risk management factor among many in how donations were used. It involved navigating difficult circumstances including the HIV epidemic, how this disproportionately affected black communities, and the urgency to maintain a safe, sustainable blood supply that did not put patients at risk of contracting transfusion transmitted infections. Race was subsequently eliminated as a risk management factor with the adoption of more sensitive testing. Why, then, did this narrative of discarding blood based on race take hold in the public imagination? While the narrative may be factually false, what kinds of social truths might it reveal? Within the context of South Africa’s national mythos of truth and reconciliation, I examine how these narratives about race and blood register tensions between different communicative models for understanding how narratives circulate and what is at stake in their circulation.

Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to be unable to construct and develop a coherent story credible to oneself? Drawing on my experience of Traumatic Brain Injury I will reflect on how acts of questioning, intersubjectivity, empathy and multimodality may facilitate and shape ways of (self) knowing and storytelling.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will commence from my experience of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), caused by a road accident, to reflect on how acts of questioning, intersubjectivity, empathy and multi-modality are embedded in (self) knowing and storytelling. TBI is an injury to the brain caused by a substantial impact to the head or body. Its effects may include reversible or permanent brain damage, coma, hallucinatory noise, disordered thoughts, personality changes and long-term difficulties in speech, movement, coordination, or fatigue, and in some cases a persistent vegetative state or death.

Ten years after "my" accident, despite extended recovery and seeming resumption of “normal” life, I remained disorientated, confused and displaced. My personal notes of the time are full of scattered sentences, images, video-recordings. Was I unable to make a story? Did I consider myself an unreliable narrator? In response to my existential confusion, I began a preliminary research based on making an ethnographic documentary on people’s social lives and experiences after coma.

I will reflect on how the research was an embodied way of questioning ‘who am I’, how it tackled most of my disorientation and it led me to make “a story” out of my experience. I will point to the role of intersubjectivity and empathy as a way of knowing oneself through the other and also to non-propositional ways of creating stories. Since the story of my TBI informed my PhD and fieldwork proposal it is worth to tackle the situated character of reliable stories and narrators