Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health (EUROPACH)

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 ersons 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 non-academic partners - 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.