Since the 90’s the history of aids/hiv increasingly has attracted the attention of historians. By now several excellent studies have been published that focus on the history of governmental action with regard to what was said to be an unprecedented pandemic; they zoom in on the geopolitics that gave shape to the medical research and have carefully reconstructed the huge discussions between France and the United States of America with regard to the discovery of the hiv-virus and they have equally unveiled and contextualized the discriminatory life circumstances that aids-patients and hiv-infected persons had to face as well as the resistance of particular activists groups of people who tried to reconcile the ongoing fight for sexual freedom with the ambition of health officers to stop any further spreading of the virus.

The list of themes and topics that have been touched upon by scholar interested in the history of aids/hiv is much longer, but what is remarkable is the fact that in the existing historiography the senses are largely absent. Besides the above-mentioned topics, several historians also have examined the history of aids-/hiv-prevention campaigns. Again, what can be noted is that the adopted approach by these scholars largely neglects the senses as an important tool in order to reconstruct the history of aids/hiv-education. Scholars like Jonathan Zimmerman and Dennis Carlson for example each have devoted a chapter to the history of aids-education in books that aim to reconstruct the emergence of sexual education since the beginning of the twentieth century. Both authors provide their readership up with intriguing historical accounts of how the educational initiatives taken in light of the aids-epidemic cannot be fully understood without taking into account the ideological backgrounds of those who invented or promoted them – i.c. the difference between a progressive point of view (promotion of condoms and sexual rights) and a conservative point of view (abstinence of sex and one partner policy).

Despite the enormous contributions Carlson and Zimmermann thus made to our nuanced understanding of all the different actors and strategies involved in the emergence and transformation of aids-education since the 80’s, the bodily and sensorial impact of these educational initiatives largely remains unknown. Convinced by the additional value of the sensorial turn in the history of education, I would like to zoom in on the history of aids-prevention from a sensorial perspective. In order to do so I will not so much focus on what happened in schools during the 80’s or 90’s, nor will I zoom in on policy documents or the representation of aids/hiv in gay magazines. Although these source documents definitely also could be used in order to reconstruct how aids/hiv influenced the shaping of our sensorium, I will argue that traditionally neglected sites of informal education might also be very useful in order to realise that goal. In particular I will zoom in on the recordings of a talkshow that was directly broadcasted in the beginning of the 90’s.

The presentation will make use of a singly case study design. It will focus on the Belgian/Flemish history of aids-education. The time period will run from 1981 (the year when the illness was presented to the world in several reports of the American Center for Disease Control) until 1993. The year 1993 is chose because this was the year when Pascal de Duve died to the consequences of aids/hiv. De Duve was a Flemish philosopher who taught philosophy in Paris from 1987 onwards and became a public figure after the publication of his first novel Izo (1990). His second book Cargo vie (The cargo of life) – published after he was diagnosed with aids and made a transatlantic voyage from Le Havre to the Antilles – and the fact that he was one of the few aids-patients at that time who was willing to witness in public about the disease only contributed to his renown. After having outlined the particular Belgian/Flemish health care context I will zoom in on a 1993 emission of the talk show Zeker weten?. In this talk show six youngsters were confronted with the chairman of the most important catholic party, namely Eric Van Rompuy. The debate dealt with a national aids-campaign launched by the contemporary Minister of Health Leona Detiège and in particular a television spot that made people aware of the importance of using a condom while having sex. The second part of the talk show consists of an interview with Pascal de Duve about his experiences with the disease and how he responded to the catholic criticism vis-à-vis the aids-campaign.

The analysis of the talk-show, first of all, will be used in order to demonstrate that senses like touch and hearing played an important role in the construction as well as implementation of aids-campaigns. Secondly, the case study will demonstrate that historians of education not only should focus on the official discourses about aids/hiv, but that they equally should pay attention to the alternative aids-narratives that existed at that time; alternative narratives which also played a role in the informal aids-education strategies that could be encountered in for instance TV-talk shows. Both the sensorial nature of bygone aids-campaigns as well as the presences of alternative aids-discourses lead me to the statement that a historian of education needs to be sensitive him-/herself. The presentation will therefore be concluded by outlining what can be understood by a sensitive historian of education.

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