Bringing together MA and MFA students from Brooklyn College and CUNY in PIMA, Screen Studies, Film, Art History, Queer and Feminist Studies, and related disciplines, this team-taught course engages closely with twelve AIDS activist videotapes from the first decade of the crisis to raise and respond to questions about videotape, analogue records, the archive, research, performance, and AIDS. The Spring 2020 class will sit and be built out here, in this growing Scalar "book," taking and growing the form of a student-generated, online, openly-available resource for more teaching, learning, and activism about the 12 tapes under consideration. In Spring 2019, the course was built in and using Omeka, and some of what remains is available there. An article about the first iteration of the experimental class by Professors Juhasz and McCoy is available on this site here (in Readings). In Spring 2020, students will build from the research, performance, art, and activism of the previous cohort, whose work focused on three current and past concerns raised by the selected tapes: prostitutes’ and sex workers rights and AIDS; art, voice, education, authenticity, and children in relation to AIDS and queerness; and community-based activism for and about communities of color, with a particular interest in the Brooklyn-based activist group, VOCAL, and their commitments to housing and safe consumption spaces for people affected by AIDS (see Student Projects).

In Alexandra Juhasz's recent book, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, co-written with AIDS activist Theodore Kerr, the two contemplate the liabilities of the up-to-now mostly patrimonial stewardship of the AIDS media archive, and posit activist interventions to find, share, and learn from holdings more diverse than the recently revisited experiences and legacies of gay white men. Our class activates one portion of just such an archive (Juhasz's own), ready to be enjoyed, used, and mined by women, people of color, students, scholars, activists, and others curious to attend to the many histories and current realities of HIV—and VHS – in America. The course both teaches and models how to store, transfer, share, research, and make art from, and reactivate one such archive: 12 videotapes focusing on AIDS, gender, sexuality and bodies selected from Dr. Juhasz’s 300+ scholarly collection of VHS tapes, recently gifted to the Brooklyn College Library, which are in the process of being made available for further use for teaching and research as the Alexandra Juhasz VHS Collection (a work in process!)