Research

‘Getting to Zero’: The Role of Post-AIDS Imaginaries in Scottish HIV Health Promotion

This project seeks to understand how ‘end of AIDS’ public health strategies have become integrated and/or contested in the Scottish context. Drawing from recent research on biomedical strategies to ‘end AIDS’ in the Global North, and my doctoral research about the visual media conventions of ‘post-AIDS’ health promotion, this project will explore how and why ‘post-AIDS’ conventions are adapted in Scotland. It will ask whether critical conversations about ‘ending HIV’ can contribute to HIV literacy strategies, and if/how ‘post-AIDS imaginaries’ might help to develop new intervention strategies to ‘end’ new HIV transmissions.

For more information, please visit the ‘Getting to Zero’ research page.

Post-AIDS Imaginaries: Configuring Speculative Futures in the Cultures of HIV Intervention (PhD Research)

My PhD thesis addresses the transformation of HIV intervention imaginaries in contemporary public health promotion and queer AIDS media. I focus on three case studies where artists, film directors, and public health promoters experiment with images of AIDS pasts and presents in order to conceptualise and produce images of post-AIDS futures. I employ an interdisciplinary textual-speculative method, which draws on previous science and technology studies (STS) and queer cultural studies scholarship. This method allows me to articulate how post-AIDS futures are constituted by the entanglement of imagined social conditions and public health promotion. My aim is to show how the meaning of health promotion and disease prevention is reconfigured within queer AIDS media to test the limits of biomedical consumption. A critical post-AIDS analysis, I suggest, can help researchers to rethink the terms and conditions of AIDS history and to create a critical relationship between the perceived past and desired futures. In previous scholarship, post-AIDS futures have been theorised as deterministic endpoints that ignore the social and cultural dimensions of the global AIDS pandemic. My research challenges this longstanding assertion and suggests that a critical theory of “post-AIDS interventions” can more effectively account for transformations of technological progress within queer sexual cultures that create imagined futures.

For more information, please visit the ‘Post-AIDS Imaginaries’ research page.

GENDER-INCLUSIVE HOUSING

Gender-inclusive housing (GIH) serves as an alternative space for transgender, transitioning, and gender-queer students. Its primary goal is to de-normalize the gender dichotomy by maintaining gender as a socially-constructed reality, though each university interprets the need of gender and sexual(ity) representation differently. Please visit the following links to learn more about gender-inclusive research at US institutions of higher education.

This research on gender-inclusive housing in the United States was undertaken as a political project to bring GIH to The Ohio State University (2013-2014).

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