Living For Tomorrow I: cultural contestations, gender politics and the AIDS epidemic

Living For Tomorrow I: cultural contestations, gender politics and the AIDS epidemic is an Interdisciplinary Arts class taught by Jill Lewis.

This course satisfies Division I requirements.

Course Description
What critical and creative tools can we explore to develop sexual safety education that is vivid and engaging? What does it mean to question gender norms in different cultural contexts? How can we design initiatives that involve young people actively in questioning gendered sexual behaviours that reproduce risk and damage and enable them to help stem the HIV/AIDS epidemic? In this course we will look at cultural texts - to open discussion of gender and how masculinity and femininity are culturally scripted. A particular emphasis will be on masculinity and sexual safety, and on ways gender research importantly questions the institution and behaviours of heterosexuality. The Living for Tomorrow course will take these questions into the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic - relating the cultural scriptings of gender to this urgent contemporary political crisis the world faces. The course draws on instructor's experience of working to build gender-focused HIV prevention initiatives in various different cultures. The course will include participatory learning work and designing creative input for HIV prevention educational action that can stimulate critical literacy about the gender system among young people. It will lay groundwork for participating students to consider education implementation possibilities with young people. Please note this is a course primarily for Division I students.

Learning Goals

 * Expressive
 * Multi-Cultural
 * Project-based
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing