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The Lecture Series on HIV/AIDS

Concordia's HIV/AIDS project includes a Community Lecture Series bringing a number of experts for public lectures in their respective areas of expertise.

The public lecture series provides educational opportunities for members of the academic community, as well as local medical facilities and offices, community and care activist groups. The audience is encouraged to interact with speakers and to enrich their networking possibilities with each other.

All lectures are free and widely publicized, and have, over the last twenty-four years, become a valued source of information and solidarity from members of the local sero-positive population, their friends and families.

This year's series:

Thriving, Life, and Living: 30 Years of AIDS Community Care Montreal

Featuring representatives from ACCM and selected scenes from "On Life and Living" 

Oct 5, 2017| 7pm | D.B. Clarke Theatre | Hall Building

To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the AIDS Community Care Montreal, this panel discussion will explore the past, present, and future of this essential HIV/AIDS service organization. Representatives from different generations and departments of the organization will discuss ACCM's response to the shifting contexts of the pandemic, with a particular focus on its current programs, initiatives, and challenges. To help elucidate these various stages of ACCM’s history, this panel will feature re-stagings of selected scenes from the acclaimed play written by alumni of Concordia’s Department of Theatre and the Interdisciplinary HIV/AIDS Course, Casey Stainsby, Amy Collier and Adjani Poirier, On Life and Living.  Based on interviews of past and present ACCM members, staff and volunteers, On Life and Living weaves together a story of the organization’s history using memories as a primary source. The play follows eight semi-fictionalized characters over a period of twenty-eight years as they recall their first encounters with the organization, experience some of ACCM’s pivotal moments, and grapple with the changing face of HIV/AIDS in Montreal. Through a combination of performance and testimonial, this panel will provide audience members with a thorough understanding of the organization’s development, its current initiatives and challenges, and its hopes for the future. The panel will be followed by a reception.

The event will take place in English. 

Memories of a Penitent Heart: A Screening/Lecture

 
Cecilia Aldarondo 

Filmmaker | New York City 

February 15th, 2018 | 7pm 

Maxwell-Cummings Auditorium
MMFA | 1379 Rue Sherbrooke W. 

We are happy to host filmmaker and activist Cecilia Aldarondo for a public lecture and screening of her celebrated documentary Memories of a Penitent Heart. Combining a wealth of recently discovered home movies, video, and written documents with artfully shot contemporary interviews and vérité footage, Memories of a Penitent Heart is a documentary that explores the relationship between memory, stigma, and the AIDS Crisis. Originating from filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo’s suspicion that there was something hidden in her family’s history, the film charts her excavation of the buried family conflict around her uncle Miguel’s death due to AIDS-related complications, and her search for Miguel’s partner Robert a generation later. A story about the mistakes of the past and the second chances of the present, Memories of a Penitent Heart, is a cautionary tale about the unresolved conflicts wrought by AIDS, and a nuanced exploration of the interplay between family, religion, and shame in times of crisis.

Cecilia Aldarondo is an award-winning documentary director-producer whose work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Firelight Media, Field of Vision, IFP, the Jerome Foundation, and many others. Her feature documentary Memories of a Penitent Heart had its World Premiere at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and will be broadcast on POV in 2017. She is a 2017 Women at Sundance Fellow and was named by Filmmaker Magazine as one of 2015’s ’25 New Faces of Independent Film.’ Aldarondo holds an M.A. from Goldsmiths College, a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and is Assistant Professor of Film at Skidmore College.

The lecture will take place in English. 
 

What's Lost? What's Left? What's Possible?

Resiliency in early years of HIV/AIDS Community‎ Organizing

Yvette Perreault | ABRPO | Nov 30, 2017 | 7pm | EV 1.605

To celebrate World AIDS Day 2017 we are happy to host Yvette Perreault, the Executive Director of the AIDS Bereavement and Resiliency Program of Ontario, to offer a first-person experience of working in the AIDS-trenches in the 80’s and early 90’s.  The narrative reflects a particular time of community organizing in an unpopular, stigmatized, heart-wrenching battle for social recognition, decent government response, and improved medical care for people who were living and dying with this illness then known as “AIDS”.

As the context has shifted to a focus on “HIV” in a North American context, the battle metaphor has changed to one of quality of life, resilience and “beyond surviving to thriving”.  This journey has included coming to terms with the impact of ongoing multiple losses, disenfranchised grief and community devastation.  Perreault’s lecture will explore some of those hard won aspects of community health whole-person well-being.

Yvette Perreault Director of the AIDS Bereavement and Resiliency Program of Ontario and co-creator of Project Sustain, a national program looking at resiliency in the AIDS field.  She has been a front-line community organizer and counsellor for four decades.  She served as AIDSupport Program Director at AIDS Committee of Toronto for eight years and prior to that, worked in the area of violence against women and children.  She is originally from Saskatoon and trained as a Psychiatric Nurse in Brandon, Manitoba.  Perreault also serves as a consultant within the community-based not-for-profit sector.  Her interest is in building teams with heart.

 

Targeted HIV-Prevention Efforts Among Sex Workers - Treatment and Risk

Mar 22nd, 2018 | 7pm 

Grande Bibliothèque
BAnQ | 475 de Maisonneuve E.

As pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) - or the use of anti-HIV medications to prevent transmission of the virus - becomes increasingly normalized as a prevention-tool amongst "high-risk" populations, the need for nuanced discussion about its benefits, limitations, applicability, and implications become pressing. This becomes increasingly pressing in the contemporary neoliberal context, where public health measures have often been criticized as coercive or conditional among marginalized populations. This panel will focus on the role of PrEP in the context of HIV-prevention for people engaged in sex work. The topics addressed in this panel will point to both the possibilities and limitations of PrEP as a prevention-tool for sex-workers and the social, political, and economic forces that shape the experiences and marginalization of people who engage in sex-work. The panel will include: Sandra Wesley, the Executive Director of Stella Montreal who will speak to the particular issues faced by sex-workers in Mont- real and the role of PrEP in effective HIV-prevention within this context; Betty Iglesias ASTT(e)Q Montreal to discuss the viability of PrEP as an ef- fective HIV-prevention tool for transwomen engaged in sex work; and Jonathan Bacon from REZO to discuss the significance of PrEP as a preven- tion tool in the context of men who engage in sex-work.

 
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