Long covid involves diverse chronic physical and cognitive symptoms with poorly understood mechanisms and limited treatment options. Many affected individuals turn to community groups for support. Drawing on ethnographic research with the Long Covid Choir, a patient-run online singing and support group, in this paper I examine how participants use overlapping sensory experiences to cultivate belonging, foster biosocial solidarity, structure care, and counter isolation. Through shared auditory and visual practices - collective breathing, guided mindfulness, and gentle stretching - the choir cultivates multi-sensory connection. These activities foster digitally mediated social intimacy for individuals who face significant barriers to in-person participation.

Using the concept of musical effervescence, a collective state of synchronized and focused intersubjectivity through music, Gavin Robert Walker reveals how and why songs have become such a ubiquitous and formidable force within the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Drawn from a rich and powerful cultural history, music has been used to inspire HIV/AIDS activism and advocacy, facilitate local psychosocial healing, communicate life-saving health information, motivate communities towards healthy behaviors, and promote acceptance of individuals living with HIV. In this book, Walker introduces musical effervescence, a collective state of synchronized and focused intersubjectivity through music, to reveal how and why songs have become such a ubiquitous and formidable force within the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. He situates music at the core of human experience, unpacking how collective singing embodies a shared sense of humanity. This compelling analysis engages deeply with interpersonal musical encounters, asking: what makes these experiences both deeply personal and fundamentally social?, how can music be relevant to such a diverse range of outcomes?, and what can musical effervescence contribute to our understanding of the arts and social, emotional, or physical wellness? Challenging conventional assumptions about the universality of music, Walker explores the relational bonds it cultivates through movement, perception, experience, and perspective to reveal music’s role in shaping the South African AIDS crisis.

Despite the often-crucial roles played by music within theatre-based public health promotion strategies, theoretical explorations regarding music within applied theatre literatures remain largely underdeveloped. This article highlights musicking - a reconceptualization of music from an object to a participatory act that can profoundly influence relationships and spaces - as an approach to understanding the various roles that music can play within applied theatre programmes. The article draws from ethnographic accounts of an HIV/AIDS applied theatre group in South Africa to advocate for increased recognition of musicking as a robust theoretical and methodological component within applied theatre praxis.

South Africa recorded and estimated 230,000 new infections in 2020, and low levels of AIDS risk awareness remain prevalent among the nation's youth. While public health awareness initiatives continue to be necessary, the large quantity of AIDS-related content that has permeated the media landscape since the start of the epidemic has resulted in increasing indifference to health messaging. Drawing from the concept of referent emotional responses, this article analyzes the reception of “Sing,” an HIV/AIDS awareness music video characterized by emotive visual representations of AIDS. The data highlight ongoing fatigue towards HIV/AIDS messaging and the potential of highly emotive media to engage target audiences in a climate of indifference to AIDS awareness. The article recommends that future awareness and prevention campaigns consider the role of emotive content in effective AIDS-related health promotion in South Africa.

During South Africa’s apartheid era, the social and political ideology of Afrikaner nationalism Othered those who disrupted an idealised vision of white heteronormative Afrikaner masculinity. While protections from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation were enshrined in the post-apartheid constitution in 1996, anti-LGBTQ violence remains a reality. It is common for young LGBTQ individuals to exercise the personal freedoms associated with leaving home to attend university to express their sexual orientations and/or gender identities more readily. This paper applies interpretive phenomenology to interview data with members of the LGBTQ student community at a rural university town in an overwhelmingly white Afrikaans region. It explores the complex and ill-defined relationships between LGBTQ student experiences, local heteronormative values, and shifting institutional identities in an era of social transformation.

In 2005, an applied theatre community outreach programme was launched to address low levels of HIV/AIDS awareness among farm workers in the Cape Winelands of South Africa. In cooperation with HIV testing organizations, the Lucky, the Hero mini-musical promoted regular HIV testing, condom use and acceptance of people living with HIV until being retired in 2017. Applying principles of the health belief model to interview data collected in 2015 from former Lucky, the Hero participants, this paper examines the effectiveness of the theatre production to achieve the behavioural outcomes of (i) encouraging regular HIV testing and ongoing awareness of HIV serostatus, and (ii) reducing AIDS-related social stigma. The findings suggest that the interventions were successful in persuading participants to know their HIV status immediately following the shows, as well as potentially contributing to a reduction of community-based external social stigma. However, the interventions were unable to maintain engagement with these behavioural outcomes in the years following the performances, resulting in low adherence to regular HIV testing and inconsistent condom use. Additionally, ongoing social and structural barriers to regular HIV testing and the potential for self-imposed HIV-related stigma were highlighted during the discussions. While applied theatre can be an effective avenue for HIV awareness and prevention, the paper demonstrates the importance of creating and maintaining strong community networks to support continued engagement with health-related behavioural outcomes.

Early in South Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis, entertainment education emerged as a powerful vehicle for communicating health and social messaging to combat the epidemic. Applied theatre now accounts for the majority of arts-based HIV interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, and continues a history of theatre for social change in South Africa in particular. While much has been written about the dramaturgical and communication theories that support such interventions, the role of music, a formidable tool in the applied theatre intervention arsenal, has received considerably less attention within applied arts intervention scholarship. This paper draws from Durkheim's collective effervescence to propose a theoretical approach to music within the creation and maintenance of effervescent assemblies that is being employed by HIV/AIDS interventions to encourage participation in HIV testing. The theoretical model of musical effervescence is situated within ethnographic fieldwork conducted while accompanying an applied HIV/AIDS theatre company on a national tour of South Africa.

South Africa has the highest number of HIV infections in the world, with more than five million people receiving anti-retroviral (ARV) therapies (UNAIDS 2019). However, during the early stages of the epidemic, there was no provision for ARVs through the state-run public health system, effectively limiting access to life-saving drugs. In response, the AIDS activist group the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and their HIV positive choir, The Generics, were established to mobilise South African civil society towards pressuring the government into deploying a national ARV programme. This article analyses and compares three culturally significant songs that were appropriated by The Generics. The analyses are socially and historically contextualised by interview data with current and former TAC members. The article suggests that songs facilitated collective mourning and psychosocial healing at a time when HIV treatments were largely unavailable. They further provided a catalyst for mobilisation that was steeped in the recent history of racial oppression against a virus that affected a disproportionate number of black South Africans. By appropriating struggle songs for their cause, The Generics tapped into emotional reservoirs of resistance culture to propel their agenda of government accountability and access to HIV medication.

Gender-based violence continues to be a leading determinant of South Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic. As such, gender socialisation and de-normalisation of gender inequality and violence remain principal objectives for public health organisations. This article discusses youth reception of a mass media HIV/AIDS prevention campaign targeting gender inequality. Applying social cognitive theory to the analysis of focus group data highlights three interrelated challenges to encouraging positive self-efficacy in gender-based violence and HIV prevention: (1) HIV/ AIDS-related media saturation; (2) AIDS messaging fatigue; and (3) challenges reconciling popular youth culture with gender equity messaging. The article recommends public health and social justice organisations consider a flexible approach to the ideological or behavioural congruence of potential celebrity ambassadors and/or media to maximise youth appeal and reduce messaging fatigue.

The recent South African student movements calling for ‘decolonized’ university curricula and campuses are the most audible and visible symptoms of the failure to transform the country’s higher education system since the democratic dispensation of the early 1990s. Specifically focusing on the role of music scholarship, practice, and departments within South Africa’s higher education institutions, this paper discusses the implementation of socially aware and critically engaged music research in a historically white university. It does so through the lens of a new institute for music practice and research that is committed to challenging the prevailing Eurocentric cultural hierarchy within its host institution, encourages meaningful interaction with the South African arts, and is informed by decolonial thought. The author writes from the perspective of a researcher who has been intimately involved in the direction and governance of the newly opened institute, and has witnessed the various institutional frustrations and barriers that have obstructed the institute’s progress. The paper concludes that the transformation of embedded institutional cultures of exclusion depends on transforming institutional structures in which academic disciplines are practiced. Research institutes could be pivotal in effecting such change.

With 3 million people receiving anti-retroviral therapies (ARV) in South Africa, it has the largest public ARV programme in the world. The implementation of this programme was made possible by the efforts of AIDS advocacy groups that lobbied the government to make ARV available. Chief among these was the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The group mobilised South Africans across socio-economic and racial lines against the AIDS denial of key members of the African National Congress (ANC). Through interviews with TAC members and ethnographic accounts of (c) current activism, this paper examines song as a method of mobilisation against HIV/AIDS-related injustices. As instrumental components of the liberation struggle, songs have become ubiqioutus within protest action, as demonstrated by the recent hashtag student movements. By utilising similar forms of rights-based activism found in the country's liberation struggle, TAC is able to tap into reservoirs of emotional potential rooted in political struggle.