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Judith Auerbach is a sociologist and independent science and policy consultant, who most recently served as Vice President, Research & Evaluation at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Her previous positions include Vice President, Public Policy and Program Development, at amfAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research), Director of the Behavioral and Social Science Program and HIV Prevention Science Coordinator in the Office of AIDS Research at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Assistant Director for Social and Behavioral Sciences in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Senior Program Officer at the Institute of Medicine. She serves on a number of commissions, advisory, and editorial boards, including the Global HIV Prevention Working Group, the NIH Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council, and the Journal of the International AIDS Society.
Abigail Baim-Lance lectures in anthropology at Roosevelt Academy, Utrecht University; affiliated with the University of Amsterdams’ Medical Centre and Institute for Social Science Research; and serves as research specialist for the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute. To date, she has worked in South Africa, studying the use of home-based care in global HIV/AIDS interventions, and in New York, exploring patient notions of ‘quality care’ in HIV programs. Abigail’s interests lie in the relationships between modes of governance and health-oriented interventions, attending to the mutual shaping of human and organizational/institutional lives. She is also interested in the ways in which health-oriented ideas gain traction in clinical practice. Abigail received her PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2010.
Sarah Bernays is a lecturer in medical sociology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She conducted research in Serbia on people living with HIV/AIDS with two Serbian researchers as part of a DfID-funded research programme. Since then, she has worked on a number of other qualitative, longitudinal studies, including a study based in the UK exploring young people’s experiences of growing up in the context of problematic parental substance use. Her current research focuses on growing up with HIV/AIDS in the UK, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Whilst being primarily focused on producing applied research for policy and advocacy, she is also interested in reflecting on and learning from the implications of participating in such potentially ‘intrusive’ research- both for participants and researchers.
Betsey Brada is a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University. She completed her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “Botswana as a Living Experiment,” draws on research conducted in southeastern Botswana between 2004 and 2008 to argue that the country’s free public HIV/AIDS treatment program demands radical transformations in both patients and health practitioners, generating new forms of self-knowledge and expertise and new ways of imagining and producing futures in the midst of a generalized epidemic. Her current project examines the impact of Botswana’s national HIV/AIDS treatment program on the country’s medical education system.
Thomas Cousins is a graduate student in the Anthropology department at Johns Hopkins University and is completing his dissertation on labour and nutrition in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. His fieldwork with timber plantation labourers is the ground for a critical analysis of the politics of HIV and nutrition in South Africa and of the forms of social life that sustain rural populations. He has worked on HIV surveillance and the social relations that frame the conduct of biomedical research in KwaZulu-Natal, and environmental management and climate change mitigation and adaptation activities in South Africa.
Josh Garoon is an instructor and researcher in the Department of Health Studies at the University of Chicago. He completed an MPH in International Health and a PhD in Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. His work draws on ethnographic and epidemiological methodologies to investigate how the interactions of physical, social, and policy environments foster differentials in population health and welfare. His dissertation, “Animals I Never Saw,” explored the impact of community-based natural resource management on the lives and livelihoods of people living on the border of Zambia’s North Luangwa National Park. His projects in Baltimore include research on the social and spiritual aspects of space and place among older “community-dwelling” adults and a participatory study of the geography of drug treatment services in city neighborhoods.
Hans Huang is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at National Central University, Taiwan, where he is also a core member of the Centre for the Study of Sexualities. He is the author of Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan (Hong Kong University Press, 2011), which critically examines the imbrications of homosexuality, prostitution and mainstream feminism in Taiwanese national culture. His current research on HIV/AIDS tracks the rise of the AIDS industry in Taiwan over the last decade. By focusing on analysing the new modes of emotional and sexual governance precipitated by neoliberalism, he explores the liminal politics of shame that forms a halo around the progression of AIDS human rights in Taiwan.
Patricia Kingori is currently completing a Ph.D. in Social and Economic Health Research Department, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her thesis is entitled: “The good, the bad and the ethical’: A sociological examination of Kenyan fieldworkers’ ethical perspectives and practices of medical research”. This research explores the factors which the everyday practices of fieldworkers and what ethics comes to mean from their position in the research hierarchy. A variety of different types of research are examined including multi-sited HIV clinical trials. Patricia will shortly be commencing her post-doctoral research at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, which to examine frontline researchers experiences of being involved in a multi-sited and multi-national paediatric HIV clinical trials. Both her PhD and postdoctoral research are funded by the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics funding stream.
Guillaume Lachenal is a lecturer in history of science at the Université of Paris Diderot and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His research is on the history and anthropology of medical research and public health in French-speaking Africa, and its link with colonialism, decolonization and neoliberal globalization. He also works on the historical epidemiology of HCV and HIV in central Africa, in collaboration with epidemiologists and virologists.
Tsitsi B Masvawure is a postdoctoral research fellow at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at Columbia University. She obtained her doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Her research focuses on gender, “sexual cultures” and HIV-risk in Southern Africa.
Ramah McKay is interested in the forms of knowledge, politics, and social relations through which global health regimes are enabled. Since 2006, she has been involved in ethnographic fieldwork in Maputo City and Morrumbala District, Mozambique. As global health interventions become increasingly common means of organizing and distributing a larger set of social services in Mozambique, her research explores how these programs impact livelihood trajectories, transform institutional ecologies, and shape modes of governance and politics. An assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, she is currently revising a book manuscript based on her research.
Ross Parsons is an anthropologist (Johns Hopkins University, 2010) and a psychotherapist (The Tavistock Clinic, 2003), with a commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship in the interstices of the social sciences. His ethnography of children and HIV in Zimbabwe was recently published (‘One Day This Will All Be Over: growing up with HIV in an eastern Zimbabwe town’, Weaver Press, Harare; and “Growing Up with HIV in Zimbabwe’, James Currey, London). He is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Psychology at Africa University in Zimbabwe. His current research focuses on emergent sexualities amongst young HIV positive adults, and on the intersections between youth, political activism, torture, sexuality and mass violence in Zimbabwe. He has an ongoing commitment to the study of religion and HIV in southern African societies.
Agata Pacho is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths University of London. Her thesis entitled ‘Multiple translations of HIV enactment in clinical environments: a study of practices, knowledges and experiences of HIV treatment in the presence of biomedical technologies’ applies novel developments in Science and Technology Studies to HIV health practice in the UK and Poland. It involves investigation of different modes of engaging with the virus, biomedical technologies, medical practices and patients’ adherence to therapies. Expectantly, it will reveal how what is often perceived in medicine as standardized procedures of managing an illness, may produce different outcomes in various contexts. The research is being undertaken in collaboration with The Training and Resource Initiative (JUSTRI) UK and Social AIDS Committee (SKA) Poland. Pacho’s project is funded by Economic and Social Research Council and received Phil Strong Memorial Prize.
Morgan Philbin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society in the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Her work explores the lived experiences of HIV-positive adolescents in urban America the era of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy. More specifically, the research looks at how these adolescents who are now imagined to live a ‘full’ life with HIV are confronted with both the clinical demands of managing a chronic and infectious disease and the challenges of navigating the transition to adulthood which for some means finding jobs, forming families, and building careers. Morgan has also done work with HIV and injection drug use in Kuming, China, and Tijuana, Mexico.
Kane Race is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. In much of his research, he has tracked the ways in which antiretroviral therapies have been redefining the terms of gay sexual and social life in Australia and comparable western contexts. He is the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (Duke UP, 2009) which critically examines how discourses of drug use (from medications to illicit drugs) have become moralized in neoliberal contexts, and develops a frame of ‘counterpublic health’ to address this process. He is currently engaged in research on how people come to confront themselves as subjects of illicit sexuality and risk (or not), a question whose significance is newly materializing in the context of HIV biomedical prevention initiatives.
Lindsey Reynolds is currently completing a joint Ph.D. in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society in the School of Public Health and the Department of Anthropology in the School for Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Her work explores the ways in which families and young people are represented in, intervened upon, and affected by global health programmes and policies. More specifically, the research interrogates tensions in the way in which divergent legal and bureaucratic systems articulate with everyday practices that shape the care of children in one locality in South Africa in the context of increasing global concern about the plight of children affected by HIV/AIDS and a perceived breakdown of family structures of support for children.
Steven Robins is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch. He has published on a wide range of topics including the politics of land, ‘development’ and identity in Zimbabwe and South Africa; the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC); urban studies and most recently on citizenship and governance. His book entitled From Revolution to Rights in South Africa: Social Movements and Popular Politics (2008) focuses on globally connected social movements, NGOs and CBOs that are involved in democratic struggles over access to AIDS treatment, land and housing. He has edited a book entitled Limits to Liberation After Apartheid: Citizenship, Governance and Culture which is published by David Philip, James Currey and Ohio University Press, 2005. His edited volume (with Nick Shepherd) is entitled New South African Keywords (Jacana and Ohio University Press, 2008).
Marsha Rosengarten is a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, at the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is one of the initiators of the Association of Social Science and Humanities in HIV which held its first conference in Durban, SA in 2011. She has published in the area of feminist theory and science and technology studies. Her most recent work is on innovations in HIV prevention, bioethics and randomised controlled trials. She is the author of HIV Interventions: biomedicine and the traffic in information and flesh University of Washington Press, 2009.