Join Geraldine Fela in conversation with Dr Dion Kagan at Hares & Hyenas to celebrate the release of her new book, Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
HIV and AIDS devastated communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. In the midst of this profound health crisis, nurses provided crucial care to those living with and dying from the virus. They negotiated homophobia and complex family dynamics as well as defending the rights of their patients.

Bringing together stories from across the country, historian Geraldine Fela documents the extraordinary care, compassion and solidarity shown by HIV and AIDS nurses. Critical Care unearths the important and unexamined history of nurses and nursing unions as caregivers and political agents who helped shape Australia’s response to HIV and AIDS.

Geraldine Fela is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. Her research and teaching traverses histories of gender and sexuality, labour, social movements and medicine. She has been widely awarded for her work examining the role of nurses during Australia’s HIV and AIDS crisis and has appeared in both scholarly and popular outlets.

Dr Dion Kagan is an academic researcher, editor and critic whose research has focused on HIV/AIDS history, culture and lived experience. He is the author of ‘Positive Images: Gay Men and the Culture of Post-Crisis’. He is currently a Research Associate in the Health+Law Partnership, at the UNSW Faculty of Law and Justice.