Interview with Janet Holland, original member of the WRAP team (Interview transcript)

Transcript from an interview with feminist researcher Janet Holland about the Women, Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP), which was conducted in 1989-1990. This interview was conducted as part of the Reanimating Data Project (2018-20).Janet conducted many of the original interviews with young women living in London, and her home acted as a base for the research team. She offers an account of how the research project came into being and how it had been shaped by the social and political context around AIDS/HIV at the time. There is also discussion of the research team's dynamics, the ways that they gained access for interviews with different young women in London and how they had managed collaborative work together in a time before email. She talks about her interest in feminism in the 1970s and what it was like to be the only woman on her male-dominated economics course at university, as well as a brief summary of her early academic career as a working class woman in the 1980s. She notes that there were new ideas around feminism and sexuality emerging at the time of WRAP and that she sometimes felt like an 'old dinosaur' compared to the younger generation of feminists. The interview concludes with Janet's hope that those reading the archived WRAP interviews will be aware of the contexts of London and Manchester in the 1980s, as she thinks that so much has changed since then in different ways. Interviews with three other original members of the WRAP team, Sue Scott, Rachel Thomson, and Sue Sharpe, can be accessed via the 'related item' links below.