Keynote Speaker

We are thrilled to announce that DHU7's keynote speaker will be Marika Cifor, Assistant Professor in the Information School and adjunct faculty member in gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington.

“Going Viral: Mobilizing AIDS Archives in Digital Cultures”

A vital supplement to scholarship on North American AIDS activism during the 1980s and 1990s, Marika Cifor’s Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota, 2022) is the first book to critically examine the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activisms alive. AIDS archives hold a powerful, if underacknowledged, significance in contemporary viral media cultures. In this talk, Cifor examines how by digitally remediating and transmitting viral imagery, aesthetic practices, and political actions from AIDS archives online through vital nostalgia practices contemporary artists are reckoning with the AIDS past. The artists use AIDS records as catalysts in art-activist mobilizations of virality that navigate the tensions between a longing to understand AIDS activist histories and the urgency of generating action to challenge the injustices that undergird current crises. This work demonstrates the power of a vital nostalgia approach: activist longings for a past time and a way of accessing and using AIDS archives that identifies, addresses, and repairs structural power inequities. Positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, Cifor examines the act of saving this activist past and reanimating it in the digital age.