HIV and AIDS: prevention, care, ARV adherence

Sexual Risk Taking in Relation to Sexual Identification, Age, and Education in a Diverse Sample of African American Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM) in New York …

by Jeff T. Steen

Human Immunodeficiency Virus Prevention among HIV-Serodiscordant Couples in Burkina Faso: Biomedical Issues, Bioethical and Cultural Challenges

by FERNANDO FABÓ

Op-ed: Digital Ways of Preventing HIV Are the Best Medicine

by Gurmit Singh

Co-authored with Christopher S Walsh

Op-ed: Digital Ways of Preventing HIV Are the Best Medicine

by Christopher Walsh

By Gurmit Singh & Christopher S Walsh

Why are we so fixated on finding a medical solution when, as social networks revolutionize sex in our community, gay... more Why are we so fixated on finding a medical solution when, as social networks revolutionize sex in our community, gay men are successfully using new technology to combat HIV?

HIV prevention for Black women: Structural barriers and opportunities

by Charmaine C. Williams

Mplus Thailand produces animations for HIV/AIDS outreach and prevention

by Christopher Walsh

News article from Fridae.com from 22 January 2010 with Nada Chaiyajit and Pad Thepsai

Responding to an alarming rise in HIV incidence among MSM in Thailand, Mplus, a community-based organisation formed to... more Responding to an alarming rise in HIV incidence among MSM in Thailand, Mplus, a community-based organisation formed to improve the sexual health of men that have sex with men (MSM), produced animations for their HIV/AIDS outreach and prevention programs. The animations are new educational resources produced to increase understandings of safe sex practices and address low perceptions of personal risk to HIV/AIDS among Chiang Mai’s diverse MSM population.

Playing public health: Building the HIVe

by Christopher Walsh

with Thomas Apperley

In thinking through the impact of digital media on how frontline workers, activists, practitioners and researchers... more In thinking through the impact of digital media on how frontline workers, activists, practitioners and researchers understand and fight HIV and AIDS, it is important to acknowledge that digital media does not only provide new channels and strategies for communicating information around HIV prevention and education. It also establishes innovative domains for conceiving of, and building, ‘resilient communities’ like The HIVe. Such digital interventions are cultural assets that confront biomedical and behavioural approaches to HIV prevention and education. Immersive and social technologies, network ubiquity and low cost mobile phones provide new tools for aggregating, representing, collecting and disseminating community-based and led data that ‘plays’ public health differently. This play involves fore-fronting the success of social science HIV prevention and education against the essentialist logic of dominant biomedical approaches. ‘Playing public health’ provides an entirely new and comprehensive picture of the agency of the HIV virus that goes beyond the pathology of the individual.  This paper proposes the goal of putting HIV prevention back into the ‘game’ of public health and playing it to win by building The HIVe.

Sexperts! Disrupting injustice with digital community-led HIV prevention and legal rights education in Thailand

by Christopher Walsh

wi th Nada Chaiyajit

In addition to growing epidemics of HIV among men that have sex with men (MSM) and transgenders in Thailand, a low... more In addition to growing epidemics of HIV among men that have sex with men (MSM) and transgenders in Thailand, a low awareness of how to access justice increases their vulnerability. This paper presents unique case studies of how two community-based and led organisations used social networking and instant messaging to address this problem. It describes and analyses how online peer-based HIV education and prevention was integrated with access to justice through free university-based clinical legal education (CLE). It argues that re-designing HIV prevention and education through digital technologies with marginalised gay men, other men that have sex with men (MSM) and transgenders is a sustainable community-based and led approach. Furthermore digital media offer strategic opportunities to overcome on-going political violence alongside entrenched stigma and discrimination that disrupt denial of access to justice for populations disproportionately at risk of HIV.

Prevention is a solution: Building the HIVe

by Gurmit Singh

Co-authored with Christopher S Walsh

This Special Issue of Digital Culture and Education (DCE), Building the HIVe, offers relevant and applicable examples... more This Special Issue of Digital Culture and Education (DCE), Building the HIVe, offers relevant and applicable examples of digital technologies being leveraged, positioned and practiced towards community-based and led HIV prevention as a solution in a digital era. The contributors to this Special Issue, frontline workers, activists, researchers and educators alike, have taken risks as they have explored innovative prevention approaches with and through digital technologies, and documented and analysed their pedagogical innovations in different cultural contexts. Importantly this Special Issue also includes the critical voices and leadership of individuals living with HIV as designers of prevention as a solution. Their timely insights, advice and understandings of HIV prevention as a solution merit close scrutiny as evidence of resourceful, imaginative and critical endeavour; they are offered to share successful interventions and stimulate further discussion.

Bringing sexy back into gay men’s community empowerment for HIV prevention, care and support: The Poz & Proud approach

by Gurmit Singh

Co-authored with Leo Schenk

The fact that HIV prevention initiatives are likely to fail without the involvement of communities of people living... more The fact that HIV prevention initiatives are likely to fail without the involvement of communities of people living with and affected by HIV is well known. Internationally, there are a variety of intervention programs designed to address this problem with a wide range of outcomes. Frequently, sustainable approaches are hampered by entrenched stigma and discrimination towards people living with HIV. This paper describes Poz&Proud in the Netherlands, a continuous community empowerment initiative that exemplifies how gay men living with HIV addressed this problem. It outlines the project context, rationale and design, and examines how Poz&Proud used the Internet to support real-time events to overcome the stigma and discrimination that prevented their community from enjoying and accessing rights to sexual, mental health and emotional well being. We argue that new digitally supported approaches, like Poz&Proud, can challenge the entrenched stigma and discrimination facing communities of people living with and affected by HIV. This is because Poz&Proud’s approach connects with the lived realities of people living with and affected by HIV through ongoing, inclusive and relevant activities and events. Poz&Proud provides a replicable model by which other sexual minority and vulnerable communities can more effectively contribute to the public health goals of HIV prevention and care over current community mobilisation approaches more frequently reported on in the literature.

The Gay Men's Task Force: the Impact of Peer Education on the Sexual Health Behaviour of Homosexual Men In Glasgow

by Paul Flowers

The role of psychosocial factors in HIV risk-reduction among gay and bisexual men: A quantitative review

by Paul Flowers

The results of a quantitative review of 36 studies of the adoption of safer sex among gay and bisexual men are... more The results of a quantitative review of 36 studies of the adoption of safer sex among gay and bisexual men are interpreted in terms of the three stages of the AIDS Risk Reduction Model (ARRM). Variables associated with the process of labelling oneself as at risk and of committing oneself to practising safer sex were moderately associated with safer sexual behaviour. One variable we included in the enactment of safer sex - relationship status - was a highly reliable predictor of unsafe sex. Particular attention is paid to the theoretical advances embodied in Catania, Kegeles and Coates (1990) AIDS Risk Reduction Model, its focus on the process of behaviour change and its specification of an enactment stage in which the intention-behaviour gap is addressed. The implications of the results are discussed with respect to a pragmatic knowledge base and future investigations of sexual health.

ADVERSE DRUG REACTIONS (ADRS) VERSUS ADVERSE DRUG EVENTS ( …

by Francisco Ibanez-Carrasco

Building the HIVe: Disrupting Biomedical HIV and AIDS Research with Gay Men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and Transgenders

by Christopher Walsh

with Gurmit Singh

Networked and digital technologies mediate the sexual behaviours and practices of many gay men, other men that have... more Networked and digital technologies mediate the sexual behaviours and practices of many gay men, other men that have sex with men (MSM) and transgenders (TG). These changes challenge the effectiveness of biomedical HIV and AIDS research, prevention and care. Driven by the normative
positivist philosophy of science, these approaches—while paramount to fighting the epidemic—have neglected to rethink their ontological and epistemological assumptions when confronting the cognitive, social, cultural, material and technological drivers of HIV. The HIVe is a dynamic model that stimulates ongoing systems-wide strategic collaboration among HIV research, policy and practice sectors to share effective digital community-based and led HIV prevention and care interventions across gay men, other MSM and TG communities. ‘Building the HIVe’ fore fronts community-based and led social sciences HIV and AIDS research, prevention and care. The model addresses digitally mediated and driven sexual behaviours to reduce vulnerabilities, construct and exchange social, cultural, economic and symbolic capitals, and challenge stigma and discrimination with the aim of stopping new HIV infections. The HIVe disrupts and queers biomedical approaches by building an accessible and dynamic open source, universal access research community engaged in reflexive performativity to improve the health and human rights of marginalised communities disproportionately at risk of HIV
and AIDS.

Building the HIVe: Disrupting Biomedical HIV and AIDS Research with Gay Men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and Transgenders

by Gurmit Singh

Co-authored with Christoper S. Walsh

HIV-positive youth's perspectives on the Internet and e-health

by Alex McClelland

Flicker S, Goldberg E, Read S, Veinot T, McClelland A, Saulnier P, Skinner H.

Supposed to make you better but it doesn't really": HIV-positive youths' perceptions of HIV treatment

by Alex McClelland

Veinot TC, Flicker SE, Skinner HA, McClelland A, Saulnier P, Read SE, Goldberg E.

Falling through the cracks of the big cities: who is meeting the needs of HIV-positive youth?

by Alex McClelland

Flicker S, Skinner H, Read S, Veinot T, McClelland A, Saulnier P, Goldberg E.

The study of social representation systems: relationships involving representations on aging, AIDS and the body

by João Wachelke

Camargo, B.V. & Wachelke, J. (2010). The study of social representation systems: relationships involving representations on aging, AIDS and the body. Papers on Social Representations, 19(2), 21.1-21.21.

Past studies have pointed out that social representations on AIDS, aging and the body might be connected. The present... more Past studies have pointed out that social representations on AIDS, aging and the body might be connected. The present paper reports an exploratory study that aims at characterizing their relationships. The sample was composed of 1118 secondary school and university undergraduate students, who completed a questionnaire about one of the three objects. The main task was to choose 3 of 12 words extracted from the literature that were more strongly related with the object in question, and then justify their choices. Data analysis consisted of descriptive statistics, correspondence analysis and typical vocabulary analysis. The results from correspondence analysis suggested that the representations on AIDS and the body are associated with the element young, whereas the representations on the body and old age intersect on elements 'health' and 'life'. It is concluded that there is empirical evidence of interaction zones involving the mentioned representations, and the reference to thêmata and recent developments from the structural approach might provide the guidelines to the underlying logic of a representational system.

Health and romance: Understanding unprotected sex in relationships between gay men

by Paul Flowers

Objectives. To explore the theoretical utility of current health psychology in understanding the occurrence of... more Objectives. To explore the theoretical utility of current health psychology in understanding the occurrence of unprotected anal sex amongst gay men in relationships.

Design. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was employed to highlight the utility of incorporating the perspective of gay men in addressing a theoretical understanding of sexual decision making.

Methods. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted with working-class gay men from a small South Yorkshire town. These were transcribed and analysed for recurrent themes which reflect the way gay men thought about sex and relationships.

Results. There were many differences between the way gay men thought about sexual activity and the way health psychology assumes men think about it. Within the context of romantic relationships men often privileged the expression of commitment, trust and love as more important than their own health.

Conclusions. Psychological theory relating to sexual health would benefit from a consideration of the way gay men report thinking about sexual behaviour in the context of romantic relationships. Such an informed theory would direct sexual health promotion beyond the simple provision of condoms