Cultural / gender studies, sexual health & HIV prevention

Jill Lewis Cultural / gender studies, sexual health &amp; HIV prevention

Jill Lewis is British, and combines working on HIV prevention and capacity building out of a base in UK with lecturing in the US as Professor of Literature and Gender Studies at Hampshire College, Amherst, one semester (4 months) a year. With a background in literature and cultural politics and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, she has been involved in the politics of gender, sexuality and sexual and reproductive health since 1972. Her work has engaged in a variety of ways with issues of race, ethnicity and cross-cultural dialogues. Since 1986 she has been actively involved in development and implementation of HIV awareness and prevention initiatives, with specific focus on youth, radical interrogations of cultural and gender issues and participative educational methods. She has pursued this focus internationally in a range of initiatives over the last 23 years.

She entered work on AIDS by training as a volunteer with the first independent regional AIDS centre in Britain, the Sussex AIDS Centre, Brighton, UK (1986-91). She became project organiser and facilitator for The National AIDS Trust's Youth Initiative in 8 cities in England (1989-91), then senior researcher, organiser and facilitator in an England-wide training: The Health Education Authority´s Secondary Schools’ Sex &amp; HIV/AIDS Education in Project (1992-94). With EU support, she founded an experimental, theatre-focused, HIV prevention, community youth project, CARE TO ACT, in Brighton UK (1992-5) and has run diverse HIV awareness initiatives or sessions including in, for example, the USA, France, Yakutia, US Virgin Islands, Croatia, Lithuania, Bosnia, South Africa, Norway, Sweden and in international student and adult settings in Europe and the US since 1987.

She lived in Norway for 10 years until 2003, where she worked for the Norwegian AIDS Association (LMA) (1995-97) preparing national conferences on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights, and on Women and HIV/AIDS, edited its publication ‘Snakk om det – kvinner og HIV/AIDS’ (‘Let's talk about it - women and HIV/AIDS’.) and ran workshops on HIV at an Oslo immigrant centre.

From 1998-2000 she worked full time as project leader and researcher for LIVING FOR TOMORROW: youth, sexual health, gender and sexuality in Nordic/Baltic/ N.W. Russian times of transition - an HIV/AIDS era initiative, an action-research project (with key focus on gender) that she developed with Baltic young adult and teenage partners in Estonia, based from the Nordic Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Oslo, funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers. The project was profiled as a best practice initiative by UNAIDS, and the NGO generated from it is still running today. In recent years she also worked on gender/HIV issues with participants in the Balkan Dialogue project in Norway and Sarajevo; with the Centre for Gender Studies KwaZulu Natal University/Durban &amp; other HIV projects in South Africa and with NGOs in Senegal.

Over the last 7 years, she has worked with the Norwegian Refugee Council designing and implementing HIV capacity building training for refugee and returnee youth education programmes. In this context she has facilitated series of trainings in Sierra Leone, N. Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Liberia, Somaliland, Azerbaijan, Georgia, N. &amp; S. Sudan, Kenya and Puntland (Somalia). She has also run trainings for Red Crescent and Save the Children, and undertaken sexual and reproductive health consultancies with UNDP in Latvia and with CARE International in Serbia. Recently she worked with International Planned Parenthood Federation in their initiatives to strengthen gender-focused aspects of their sexual health / HIV work, in their global regional and S. &amp; S.E. Asian networks,.

In January 2008 she worked with students and NGOs in Senegal on small NGO-led films for use in their HIV-related work. She was consultant editor for the Guide leaders’ manual on HIV for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, launched at the Mexico World AIDS conference, 2008. She was invited to give a special seminar for NORAD at the Foreign Ministry in Oslo on Sexuality matters! Sexuality and HIV prevention work. She was abstract reviewer for the August XVII International AIDS Conference held in Mexico City. In June she worked with Care International on a men and reproductive health project with Roma and Serb refugees / IDPs in S. Serbia, and has since given talks in SW England on Birthing with HIV, and on Sexual Health and the Arts. In November 2008 she facilitated an international colloquium in Morocco on Youth, Sexuality and Faith for international youth members of IPPF.

The Living for Tomorrow framework, (with its gender focus on heterosexual masculinity and culture in HIV prevention) is now incorporated in courses at Hampshire College in the US, from which students have designed and run interactive HIV workshops with teenage peer leaders in youth organisations in a high HIV-risk Latino immigrant community, and participated in HIV-related internships internationally.

She is a member of the Gender Group of the UK AIDS and Development Consortium. A focus on cross-cultural understanding, sexuality issues and on masculinity, involving men of all ages, alongside women, in the politics of gender, sexual safety and risk awareness and clearer understandings of condom use within prevention are central to her gender-focused work. She recently participated in an international symposium in Senegal (Oct 2007) on masculinity and HIV prevention, with a paper entitled Careful Interventions: masculinity and the condom challenge. A recent paper co-written with Gill Gordon from the International HIV/AIDS Alliance was entitled: Terms of contact and touching change: investigating pleasure in an HIV epidemic.

In Spring 2009 she will again be teaching at Hampshire College, including courses The Heart of the Matter: an introductory exploration of the HIV pandemic and Living for Tomorrow: cultural contestations, gender politics and the AIDS epidemic

She is currently co-ordinating with Sonke Gender Justice,Network in South Africa and partners in Kenya and Sierra Leone, an HIV prevention film project Careful Interventions: Facing into the condom challenge in the era of HIV and AIDS A resource film/DVD for strengthening boys' and men's engagement with safety from HIV in Sub Saharan Africa, funded by NORAD.

Her core interests are  involving men and women in critical gender issues important for building effective HIV prevention &amp; sexual well-being, and  positive mobilisation of young people against the HIV pandemic, the spread of STIs and unwanted pregnancies

Her work includes the following Living for Tomorrow publications: Mobilising Gender Issues. Tracing the issues and strategies of building the Living for Tomorrow project on gender and HIV/AIDS prevention with youth; Challenging Gender Issues tracing crucial implications of research on young people’s attitudes to men, women and sex; How to bridge the gap between us? Gender and sexual safety - a booklet with text in English, Russian and Estonian, made by and with teenagers in the project; and Gendering Prevention Practice a practical guide to working with gender in HIV prevention and education for sexual safety

January - June every year: Professor of Literature and Gender Studies, School for Interdisciplinary Arts, Hampshire College

June - December every year: Living for Tomorrow HIV/AIDS prevention with a central focus on gender TOTNES, Devon TQ9 5EB, England Tel: +44 1803 862112 (US +1 413 253 9648) E-mail: jlewis@hampshire.edu