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Through the lens of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, EUROPACH 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 so as to enable a reflexive and situated approach to
the future. By analysing the discourses and practices that make up HIV/AIDS policy worlds in Germany, Poland, Turkey, the UK, and at the European level, EUROPACH aims to describe the varied citizenship claims (in terms of entitlements and responsibilities) that emerge across shifting notions of Europe. Researchers will unpack the logics of policy discourses and disentangle the transnational histories that have been involved in the co-production of these policy assemblages, and develop a corresponding interactive map to be housed on the project’s website. They will also 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. Ethnographic research conducted in spaces of policy development and negotiation, combined with analyses of art works engaging with the epidemic, will be used to situate citizenship models in their temporal trajectories, and then to scrutinize them – in close discussion with the project’s 14 APs – for insights as to possibilities for the future. 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.
METHODS
Analysis of citizenship models
What citizenship models emerge in relation to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Europe, and what are their commonalities and differences?
How must citizenship analysis at the nexus of sexuality, health and the body be expanded to account for the transnational dynamics of the epidemic in Europe?
What problems arise in the landscape of European citizenship based on research from the other axes, and what are routes for improvement in terms of health, rights and responsibilities that are grounded in the knowledges and affective
attachments of the past? What implications do these problems have on the possibilities afforded by recent biomedical technologies in the fight against the epidemic, and on the broader fields of gender, sexuality, migration, drug use and
health disparities?
Research goals
1. Provide a contextualized analysis of European HIV/AIDS policies concerning
the terms employed to construct “milestones” of policy development and the labels
for describing affected communities.
2. Examine the tactics, norms, values, and assumptions implicit in the policy
instruments that frame citizenship around HIV/AIDS.
3. a) Record, archive and examine the narratives of a diversity of persons living with HIV or AIDS (PLWHA) and AIDS activists;
b) Assemble a listing of art works that address HIV/AIDS in Europe, analyze them
as materialized forms of knowledge and reflective commentaries on policy worlds
of the past.
4. Zooming out from a focus on HIV/AIDS, elucidate citizenship projects at the
nexus of sexuality, health and the body in the selected countries and across
Europe, and identify their commonalities and divergences in an effort to contribute
to interdisciplinary discussions about the narratives, practices, entitlements and
responsibilities of citizenship claims in Europe.
5. Synthesize key obstacles and possible strategies for building an enhanced
European citizenship framework that is built on a contextualized elaboration and
comparison of national and supranational engagements with the previous and
ongoing needs, resources and strategies of those communities disproportionately
impacted by illness with a key focus on HIV/AIDS.
Associate Partners
GERMANY
Deutsche AIDSHilfe
Hydra
UK
National AIDS Trust
Justri
TURKEY
Trans Danışma Merkezi Derneği (TDer)
İnsan Kaynağını Geliştirme Vakfı (İKGV)
Kaos GL
EUROPE:
AIDS Action Europe
European AIDS Treatment Group
(EATG)
International Committee on the
Rights of Sex Workers in
Europe (ICRSE)
European Network of People Who
Use Drugs (EuroNPUD)
ACT UP Oral History Project, USA
POLAND
SIEĆ PLUS
Social AIDS Committee
Consortium
Institute for European Ethnology,
HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin, Germany
Prof. Dr. Beate Binder PI
Todd Sekuler and Dr. Ulrike Klöppel
Department of History,
University of Basel, Switzerland
Prof. Dr. Martin Lengwiler PI
Dr. Zülfukar Çetin and Dr. PeterPaul
Bänziger
Department of Sociology,
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Prof. Dr. Marsha Rosengarten PI
Emily Nicholls
Institute of Sociology,
Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland
Dr. Agata Dziuban PI
Dr. Justyna Struzik
