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Durham History Department
Student walking outside the Department of History

AIDS, Inequality and Religious Ethics of Care in 1980s and 90s Britain

Partners

This project radically rethinks the place of religion in shaping public responses to AIDS. The project complicates narratives of secularisation in modern Britain, examines how new viruses expose and entrench inequalities, and expands a queer ethics of care. In a context where stigma and shame were so powerful, any act of recovery is important: this project highlights unique and almost unknown documents on AIDS, while creating a new AIDS archive through ethnographic interviews. The Salvation Army’s intervention in HIV/AIDS is little known. Its potential to illuminate the broadest historical and most resonant dynamics of the AIDS crisis demands its telling. 

The project is run in collaboration with the Salvation Army's International Heritage Centre (archives and museum). The project's supervisors are Prof. Julie-Marie Strange, Dr. David Minto, Prof. Leanne McCormick (Ulster University) and Steven Spencer (Salvation Army International Heritage Centre).