Where: Online (a zoom link will be forwarded to registered participants closer to the event)

Cost: Free to OHV members, $10.00 for non-members

The ‘Talking About Listening’ series brings together historians doing outstanding work in conversation about their research and practice.

This conversation brings together Dr Geraldine Fela and Sian Edwards, who have both conducted oral history-based research exploring HIV nursing in the AIDS crisis, with Dr Alice Garner, whom you all know as President of Oral History Victoria.

Dr Geraldine Fela is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Macquarie University in the Department of History and Archaeology. Her research sits at the intersection of labour history, gender and sexuality studies and social history. She is currently undertaking a project examining the 1998 waterfront dispute between the Maritime Union of Australia and Patrick Stevedores. Her doctoral research, which she is working towards publishing as a monograph, explored the role of Australian nurses and nursing unions in responding to the HIV and AIDS crisis.

Sian Edwards is an HIV specialist nurse. Her HIV work began in 1986 in Sydney, when she responded to an advert in a newspaper ‘seeking a community nurse willing to look after patients with AIDS’. Since those early days Sian has work in the HIV specialty in clinical, educational and research roles in the UK, Australia and Zambia. Sian has managed three life history projects, all of which archived in the British Library with public accessibility. One of these projects, ‘The AIDS Era; an oral history of UK health care workers’ was completed in 2019 and consists of 63 extensive life history interviews with health care workers across the country. Using only the nurses’ interviews from that project Sian is now finalising a book exploring the nurses experience of this profound time in the history of health care. Sian is the manager of the Health Program at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

Tickets: To register click here.