Doctoral Dissertation Research: Entitlement Claims and NGO Professionalization in the Making of the Chinese AIDS Epidemic

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New School doctoral candidate Carol Wang, supervised by Dr. Miriam Ticktin, will investigate China's transition to a liberal market economy, a subject of much scholarly and popular discussion, given its wide-reaching impact on individuals, the environment, and global exchange. This research considers the effects of China's economic transition through AIDS activism, a phenomenon that links the rise of consumer entitlements, the spread of contagious disease, and the influence of international public health and human rights in post-reform China. The research will focus on the emergence of politically engaged HIV-positive individuals and the ways in which they are drawing from international discourses to reframe an epidemiological concern as a problem of human and legal rights. The project will utilize social science methods, including twelve months of participant observation in Beijing and other China locations; structured and semi-structured interviews with Chinese HIV/AIDS activists, Euro-American human rights trainers, and others; and textual analysis of written materials. These methods will allow the researcher to address the multi-directional interconnections between HIV/AIDS and human rights, two global forces that have crossed China's borders as indirect results of state economic policy. This research will bring law and medicine into the same field of inquiry, and will examine how these two overlapping and yet often contradictory regimes of expertise come together as civil society groups engage in processes of professionalization. This research will also illustrate the evolution of China's health care and legal systems during economic liberalization. By examining the situation through the eyes of those who must navigate these bureaucracies, this study may be helpful to national policymakers as well as international agencies invested in the development of these systems. This research is co-funded by the Cultural Anthropology program and the Law and Social Sciences program and will contribute to the training of a graduate student.