Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health

Through the lens of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, this project will explore how the past is mobilised in the unfolding of activism, health policy and citizenship in Europe. As transnational health-governing bodies seek to integrate a fortified biomedical approach into local structures of care and prevention, the project asks how the past has come to shape these structures to enable a reflexive and situated approach to the future.

EUROPACH aims to describe the varied citizenship claims – in terms of entitlements and responsibilities – that emerge across shifting notions of Europe. It will do this by analysing the discussions and practices that make up HIV/AIDS policy in Germany, Poland, Turkey and the United Kingdom, and at the European level.

Researchers will carry out ethnographic research and analyses of artworks engaging with the epidemic. They will:

• examine the logics of policy discussions and the transnational histories that have been involved in the co-production of these policies
• develop a corresponding interactive map
• record interviews with long-term activists and persons living with HIV or AIDS, which will provide a foundation for a new European HIV/AIDS oral history archive

In accounting for the multiplicity and entanglements of histories that coexist in contemporary citizenship frameworks at the nexus of sexuality, health and the body, EUROPACH aims to provide support for mapping out the dynamics of integrating local communities, contexts and histories into European structures and praxes of citizenship.