This book critically examines the many complex entanglements between AIDS activism and HIV science. It takes readers on a medical anthropological expedition across time and space that highlights the stakes from the perspective of those most affected by the epidemic. Author Robert Lorway reveals how early in the HIV epidemic, amid inadequate government leadership, communities of people living with and directly affected by HIV and AIDS rose to become a vital force at the forefront of prevention responses. Yet now, more than three decades later, HIV prevention and treatment is increasingly being placed under the jurisdiction of clinical, epidemiological, and management scientific expertise. In this kind of context, where does activism figure into the possibility of more democratized collaborations between affected communities, scientists, and policy makers? Coverage draws upon the findings from an array of community research projects conducted in Canada, India, and Kenya over a 22-year period. It weaves together rich, original data sources that range from in-depth qualitative interviews, field notes, and primary and secondary archival document retrievals in these three regions. Offering a rich diversity in perspectives, this book tackles the broader themes related to global health policy, science, and transnational activism at the same time as it highlights the experiences and local arenas where debates about activism and science play out. In the end, Lorway questions the growing expectation for affected communities themselves to produce sound evidence to legitimize their advocacy projects. He calls for the planners and implementers of biomedically oriented HIV research and interventions to more meaningfully engage with communities in ways that de-monopolize decision making as a matter of ethics and improved scientific practice.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A comprehensive study of global AIDS activism over the past twenty-five years. Few diseases have provoked as many wild moralistic leaps or stringent attempts to measure, classify, and define risk and treatment standards as AIDS. In Politics in the Corridor of Dying, Jennifer Chan documents the emergence of a diverse range of community-based, nongovernmental, and civil society groups engaged in patient-focused AIDS advocacy worldwide. She also critically evaluates the evolving role of these groups in challenging authoritative global health governance schemes put in place by what she describes as overcontrolling or sanctimonious governments, scientists, religious figures, journalists, educators, and corporations. Drawing on more than 100 interviews conducted across eighteen countries, the book covers a broad spectrum of contemporary sociopolitical issues in AIDS activism, including the criminalization of HIV transmission, the fight against "big pharma," and the politics of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Chan argues that AIDS activism disrupts four contemporary regimes of power—scientific monopoly, market fundamentalism, governance statism, and community control—by elevating alternative knowledge production and human rights. This multidisciplinary book is aimed at students and scholars of public health, sociology, and political science, as well as health practitioners and activists. Politics in the Corridor of Dying makes specific policy recommendations for the future while revealing how AIDS activism around the world has achieved much more than increased funding, better treatment, and more open clinical trial access: by forcing controlling entities to democratize, activists have changed the balance of power for the better and helped advance permanent social change.

" . . . a coherent and fascinating social analysis of AIDS-related knowledge, examining the social facts of knowledge production and developments interior to communities of science." Medical Humanities Review " . . . a multilayered, composite approach that involves multisited ethnographic research in different spheres of the collective responses to AIDS . . . " —Choice The response to AIDS from various groups in developing knowledge of and about this health crisis is the focus of this revealing work. Rio de Janeiro serves as an observation point for the study of the intersecting worlds of activism, clinical practice, and biomedical research.

Since the early days of the AIDS epidemic, many bizarre and dangerous hypotheses have been advanced to explain the origins of the disease. In this compelling book, Nicoli Nattrass explores the social and political factors prolonging the erroneous belief that the American government manufactured the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to be used as a biological weapon, as well as the myth's consequences for behavior, especially within African American and black South African communities. Contemporary AIDS denialism, the belief that HIV is harmless and that antiretroviral drugs are the true cause of AIDS, is a more insidious AIDS conspiracy theory. Advocates of this position make a "conspiratorial move" against HIV science by implying its methods cannot be trusted and that untested, alternative therapies are safer than antiretrovirals. These claims are genuinely life-threatening, as tragically demonstrated in South Africa when the delay of antiretroviral treatment resulted in nearly 333,000 AIDS deaths and 180,000 HIV infections—a tragedy of stunning proportions. Nattrass identifies four symbolically powerful figures ensuring the lifespan of AIDS denialism: the hero scientist (dissident scientists who lend credibility to the movement); the cultropreneur (alternative therapists who exploit the conspiratorial move as a marketing mechanism); the living icon (individuals who claim to be living proof of AIDS denialism's legitimacy); and the praise-singer (journalists who broadcast movement messages to the public). Nattrass also describes how pro-science activists have fought back by deploying empirical evidence and political credibility to resist AIDS conspiracy theories, which is part of the crucial project to defend evidence-based medicine.

Pioneering cultural critic Cindy Patton looks at the complex interaction between modern science, media coverage, and local activism during the first decade of the epidemic.

Discusses the politics and sociology of AIDS research, describes how lay activists have gained scientific credibility, and examines the implications of the democratization of expertise