Sexually transmitted infections such as HIV are illnesses that affect both a person's physical health as well as their mental and social wellbeing. Yet, the global development of public health responses have, for the most part, remained focused on the physical wellbeing of people with little attention paid to the individual's emotional wellbeing. With the highest number of HIV positive people worldwide, South Africa requires a new and positive approach to the pandemic (Ross 2008). This article aims to bring attention to practice, in this instance, theatre and performance-based work, which considers the people and communities affected and afflicted by HIV, and other sexual health concerns, as individuals with individual thoughts and emotions, for greater inclusion in a more positive approach to tackling AIDS. This article will consider three examples of such practice, namely the Themba HIV/AIDS Organisation, the Etafeni Centre and our place, our stage (OPOS) project.

This article considers the challenges of juggling the demands of motherhood in the experience of early career researchers operating in the British neoliberal academy, and suggests opportunities for alliance and resistance. Scholarship examining questions of labour in the neoliberal university (Evans 2010, Lynch 2010, Morrish 2015 has made evident the effects of metrics, managerial rationalities, institutional structures and performances of equality (Tzanakou 2019) on marginalised academics. Furthermore, scholarship on gendered and racialised labour in the academy (Arday and Mirza 2018, Bhopal 2018, Gabriel and Tate 2017, Gqola 2018) has made visible the enforcement of structural inequalities in the distribution and undertaking of academic labour, its institutional visibility and resulting immobility. The typical narrative of academic success is undergirded by a specific form of resilience: a politics of coping that is dictated by neoliberal structures which prioritise particular forms of work and recognise only certain forms of commitment as valid or valuable. In this ecology, the affective labours of mothers in academia are often occluded.We write this article together, as recent new academic mothers, in order to explore forms of solidarity. We are interested in thinking about how motherhood and related caring responsibilities create a particular, precarious positioning in the university, one that raises important questions about ways of working in our pedagogy, writing, research and artistic practice.Academia creates the expectation of structural compliance, even though it paradoxically also demands intellectual agency. In this article, we offer an intersectional consideration of the stakes of being a mother in academia. We talk about the guilt and shame that we juggle personally and professionally, examine the entanglements of these affects with our academic work, and discuss our place in the neoliberal institution. We articulate motherhood as a feminist strategy of resistance and allyship, and call attention to re-positioning that experience by developing new ways of moving forward, together.

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