Video:  On 17 August 2021, Carla Treloar facilitated a seminar for the UNSW Centre for Social Research in Health (CSRH UNSW Sydney) Seminar as part of the Spotlight in Stigma series with presentations by Loren Brener, Timothy Broady, Darryl O’Donnell (AFAO) and Aaron Cogle (NAPWHA).

In the second seminar of our Spotlight on Stigma series, CSRH explored why and how policy processes have focused on stigma. An expert panel discussed how policy processes can enable efforts to tackle stigma, where gaps remain and how community voices are included in policy processes around stigma.

Speakers include:

• Matt Craig — Manager of the HIV and STI Unit at the NSW Ministry of Health.
• Carrie Fowlie — CEO of Hepatitis Australia
• Jules Kim — CEO of Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association – the peak national organisation that has been representing sex workers as well as sex worker organisations, collectives and projects throughout Australia since 1989.
• Stuart Manoj-Margison — Director of Blood Borne Viruses, Sexually Transmissible Infections, and Torres Strait Health Policy Section within the Immunisation and Communicable Diseases Branch of the Australian Government Department of Health.

Facilitator: Scientia Professor Carla Treloar, Director, UNSW Centre for Social Research in Health & UNSW Social Policy Research Centre

In the third seminar, Carla Treloar will explore the organisation and structure of health systems. The expert panel will discuss how these organisational and structural factors can produce stigma and give us tools for tackling stigma within health systems.

Speakers include:

• Sione Crawford — currently the CEO of Harm Reduction Victoria: the organisation representing people who use drugs in Victoria, Australia and has previously worked in the ACT and NSW at sibling organisations.
• Associate professor Fiona Haigh — Director of the Health Equity Research Development Unit (HERDU) a joint initiative between the UNSW Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity and the Sydney Local Health District.
• Dr. Thomas Ungar — Psychiatrist-in-Chief at St. Michael’s Hospital of the Unity Health Toronto and Associate Professor University of Toronto. He is an award winning educator, communicator and creator of the You Tube web-series Think You Can Shrink?

Facilitator: Scientia Professor Carla Treloar, Director, UNSW Centre for Social Research in Health & UNSW Social Policy Research Centre

In the the fifth seminar of the Spotlight on Stigma series, we look to a key structural aspect of stigma in the BBV sector – the law. We will interrogate how laws can both generate and reduce stigma. The panel of speakers will provide insights from research, legal practice and community perspectives.

Speakers include:

• Paul Kidd is a HIV activist and criminal defence lawyer based in Melbourne. He has a long-standing interest in issues around HIV criminalisation, public health law, consent, crime and stigma. He is currently completing postgraduate studies in criminal law at Monash University.

• Kate Seear is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Associate Professor at La Trobe University. She holds honours degrees in Arts and Law, a PhD in Sociology and is a practising lawyer. Her research is socio-legal and empirical in nature and typically explores connections between law, alcohol and other drugs, health, gender and the body. Her particular interests include intersections between harm reduction and the law, the law and blood-borne viruses, and drugs, gender, stigma and human rights. Kate is the author of numerous books, articles and reports on drug law. Her most recent book is Law, drugs and the making of addiction: Just Habits (2020), and was the winner of the 2020 Socio-Legal Studies Association’s History and Theory Book Prize in the UK.

• Dylan O’Hara is a queer and trans sex worker and the Acting Manager of Vixen, Victoria’s Peer-only Sex Worker Organisation. Vixen is based on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Through its work, Vixen promotes the cultural, legal, human, industrial, occupational and civil rights of all sex workers, and has been leading the Victorian campaign for the full decriminalisation of sex work for many years. Vixen is proudly 100% by and for sex workers, and is a member of Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association, and NSWP, Global Network of Sex Work Projects. Dylan started sex work as a brothel-based sex worker in Aotearoa, and they have been involved in the sex workers rights movement and sex worker-run online media since 2010

Facilitator: Scientia Professor Carla Treloar, Director, UNSW Centre for Social Research in Health & UNSW Social Policy Research Centre