The annual Dr. John Lamont Peterson Annual Research Symposium is the culminating event for participants in the Student Opportunities for AIDS/HIV Research (SOAR) program. The symposium features a keynote, and presentations by SOAR scholars who share findings from their behavioral and social science research related to HIV and/or sexual and gender minority populations. This symposium is free and open to the public. Portions of the symposium will be streamed on Zoom. 
RSVP if you wish to attend lunch or the reception, or to get the Zoom link.
Note: Any registrations after April 11 are NOT guaranteed to receive a lunch. Thank you for understanding.Symposium Schedule:9:00 am: Registration & check-in9:30 am: Welcome Remarks 10:00 am: SOAR Scholar Lightning TalksEamonn McGonigleMyla LyonsNoelle HarrisHolly GurnikJasmine Mumpfield11:00 am: Keynote Presentation by Jallicia A. Jolly: "HIV/AIDS in Ethnographic Perspective: Black Women, Bodily Autonomy, & Reproductive Justice"12:00 - 12:45 pm: Lunch (provided for registered attendees*)12:45 - 1:45 pm: Poster Session (SOAR Junior Cohort)2:00 pm:SOAR Scholar Lightning TalksAdrian BeyerNiah BoydJoshua KennedyRakira UrquhartEvan Hall3:00 pm: Mentor Recognition & Graduation Celebration4:00 - 5:00 pm: Reception with light refreshments--------------------------------------
Keynote: "HIV/AIDS in Ethnographic Perspective: Black Women, Bodily Autonomy, & Reproductive Justice"Even as Black women have been at the heart of struggles against HIV inequities and reproductive violence in the Americas, they remain excluded and deprioritized in HIV/AIDS research, clinical trials, and public health interventions. In this talk, Dr. Jallicia Jolly examines how the social, erotic, and political experiences and practices of working class Black Jamaican women living with HIV challenge contemporary biomedical approaches of the global response to the HIV pandemic that emphasize implied black pathology, isolable “risk” groups, individual behavior change around sex, and self-sufficiency. Foregrounding a black transnational ethnography of women's HIV/AIDS organizing in Jamaica and the United States, Jolly illustrates how women's grassroots care work, community organizing, and participation in a diasporic HIV politics resist and reshape the biomedical category of illness. Furthermore, she demonstrates how they hold institutions accountable for the unequal distributions of resources that have historically advantaged White men in the global North as the worthiest recipients of aid, support, and protection. This talk calls for a more robust and culturally-resonant approach to HIV/AIDS that is attentive to the dynamics of Black women's sexuality and reproductive capacities while invested in concrete systemic changes that support enabling conditions for women to both exercise bodily autonomy and become active beneficiaries of scientific advances.Jallicia A. Jolly is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College. Dr. Jolly researches and teaches on Black women’s health, grassroots activism, and reproductive justice; the transnational politics of gender, structural racism, sexuality, class, and health; intersectionality and HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and Caribbean; Black feminist health science, Black motherhood, and birth justice.