Research Community Development Grant: Collaborative Research: Knowledge of HIV/AIDS: Expertise, Participation, and the Archive in the Long Pandemic

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This Research Community Development (RCD) project brings together social scientific and humanistic scholars of HIV/AIDS situated within the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The core goal is to support community formation, the exchange of ideas, and to foster novel cutting edge research to synthesize knowledge of this long pandemic. Activities will be organized to bridge past findings of social studies of HIV/AIDS with contemporary trajectories in the field focused around three core themes: the archive, expertise, and participation. Social and humanistic scholarship on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in North America has distinct phases. The period prior to 1996, before effective treatments for HIV, was marked by a wide array of scholarship on the pandemic. However, public attention to HIV/AIDS experienced a decline and fragmentation after more effective treatments became available – sometimes with the mistaken rationale that the pandemic was over (or at least well-managed) and coupled to a “second silence” in public attention to AIDS. Biomedical innovation has resulted in treatments that can enable a person living with HIV to live a lifespan comparable to that of an HIV-negative person. However, antiretroviral therapies are not cures, they come with side effects, require access to resources and stability to remain in care (from health insurance to housing), are dependent on the pharmaceutical industry, and overall, have not ended the pandemic locally or globally. Four decades into the pandemic, even as many countries proclaim that they will end their HIV/AIDS epidemics by 2030, there is no actual end in sight. HIV has become a long pandemic, one that is both exceptional while also overlapping with many ongoing human rights, economic and public health crises. This RCD project aims to overcome the intellectual fragmentation that accompanied the second silence on HIV/AIDS in STS and its constituent disciplines by creating infrastructure to support a scholarly community around these topics. This project will assemble a productive research community via a series of three annual workshops; by developing an online forum for coordination; by supporting new research collaborations with small grants; and by creating a robust mentorship program that will pair early career scholars with more established scholars. The project will support the next generation of scholars focused on social studies of illness and will seek to develop general insight for both long-standing and emerging pandemics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.