What does HIV/AIDS have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic and recent outbreaks of Mpox? In this conversation, Jaime Garcia-Iglesias (University of Edinburgh) and Max Schnepf (Freie Universität Berlin) approach pandemics not as isolated events but as interwoven histories. Drawing on their social science research, they explore how lived experiences, memories, and affects connect diseases that may appear temporally and epidemiologically distinct.

Together, they reflect on questions of memory, privilege, and biomedical futurity: Who has the capacity to remember or the privilege to forget past pandemics? How do different generations of gay men recall HIV in the aftermath of COVID-19? And how do advances in HIV treatment and prevention shape how we imagine both pasts and futures?

Jaime Garcia-Iglesias is Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society. He is a social scientist working on viral lives, particularly HIV, COVID and Mpox. His work spans sociology, humanities, and public health and has covered the role of memory in gay men’s experiences of COVID-19, the use of dating apps during COVID-19 for improved wellbeing, and community responses to the mpox outbreak. He is the author of The Eroticising of HIV: Viral Fantasies (Palgrave, 2022) and lead editor of Viral Times: Reflections on the COVID-19 and HIV Pandemics (Routledge, 2024).

Max Schnepf is a cultural anthropologist at Freie Universität Berlin, working at the intersection of medical anthropology, queer studies, and affect theory. In their doctoral research, Max investigates the effects and affects of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), a drug used to prevent HIV. Max’s engagement with HIV prevention and sexual cultures spans Germany, Colombia, and Australia, tracing the connections between public health, the arts, and activism. Their writing has been published in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung, and Feminist Anthropology. Max is one of the curators of VIRAL INTIMACIES.