Dr Wendy Rickard, in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, has secured a Daphne Jackson Fellowship for her project, ‘Disrupted Narratives, Exposed Voices:  A Global Analysis of HIV Oral History and its Public Dissemination’.

The Daphne Jackson Fellowship scheme supports people who have taken a break from their research career for family, caring or health reasons, and combines a research project with retraining and mentoring to help them return into senior academic roles.

Worldwide, 40 million people have died with AIDS and about the same number live with HIV.  The project will ask whether we have HIV stories from all over the world or just from its most privileged parts. Dr Rickard will count recordings, identify gaps in the voices captured – particularly those from the Global South - and ultimately, reveal new information about the way pandemic history is recorded.

The work will build on Dr Rickard’s research since the 1990’s that is held at the British Library Sound Archive, some of which formed the basis for the 2022 BBC TV series, ’AIDS: The Unheard Tapes’.

Dr Rickard said: “For the first time in history, oral histories powerfully captured people’s stories of a pandemic as it was happening, providing depth and richness beyond statistics to understand their experiences better.

“HIV is still going on, especially in vulnerable countries, so we have a chance to rectify any imbalances where HIV experiences may be missing, hidden or unequally valued. This project will question whether oral history resources are unfairly shared, just like HIV medicines meaning that the history we are recording is unbalanced.

“I’m grateful to the Daphne Jackson Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for this opportunity, and am looking forward to seeing what can be found with modern searching capacities and what lessons can be learned about how we remember future pandemics.”

Due to the period covered, early interviews were recorded before the internet existed, and there may be issues with those which have been digitised and shared on-line. Even where archives can be identified, there may still be significant gaps in terms of material which has the right permissions to be listened to.

The project will look for those interviews that may or may not be on websites and will also explore what AI can do in terms of searching for, collecting and digitising material, and who has access to the technology for recording oral histories, testing issues of accessibility and power.

Dr Rickard will also seek to find endangered archives where existing stories are under threat and identify how easy it may be for others to find, support and use them.