Jaime Shearn Coan

Within the interdisciplinary field of HIV/AIDS studies, the recent highlighting of confluences between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 has led to renewed interest in the AIDS epidemic. Rather than that interest being of a memorial nature, recent conversations have focused on the structural inequities that continue to create widely different health outcomes. The collective care work done by those affected by AIDS early on in the pandemic is inspiring during a time when many feel hopeless. I see the ramifications of this confluence as encouraging scholarship and teaching to be rooted more in care, to be attentive to collective rather than individual health, and to see interdisciplinary collaboration, especially between the humanities and the sciences, as imperative to societal health.