Embedded Files
Tankut Atuk is an Assistant Professor of Sociology of Public Health and Medicine at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research is situated at the intersections of Public/Global Health, Medical Anthropology, Social Epidemiology, and Queer Health Activism. His current book project looks at the socio-epidemiological dimensions of the highly politicized HIV epidemic in Turkey where public health has become a pathogenic technology. Through community-engaged and activist research, he seeks to understand and redress the ways in which the formal actors of public health leave HIV-negative people, particularly LGBTQI+ communities, susceptible to HIV infection and HIV-positive people defenseless against socio-medical violence.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Atuk, T. (2024). “If I knew you were a travesti, I wouldn’t have touched you”: Iatrogenic violence and trans necropolitics in Turkey. Social Science & Medicine, 345, 116693.
Atuk, T. (2020). Pathopolitics: Pathologies and Biopolitics of PrEP. Frontiers in Sociology, 5, 53.
Kat Brewster is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information CRIT Lab. There, she works with Oliver Haimson to develop technologies to better serve marginalized people. She received her PhD in 2023 from the University of California, Irvine, where she wrote her dissertation, titled, ‘Surviving Online: Histories and Afterlives of Queer Networked Computing at the Onset of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the United States (1980-1990).’ Her book project explores LGBTQ+ digital recordkeeping practices and community archive efforts online, from the 1980s to present day.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Brewster, K., & Ruberg, B. (2020). SURVIVORS: Archiving the history of bulletin board systems and the AIDS crisis. First Monday, 25(10).
Jennifer Brier is professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and professor of History at UIC. She specializes in US sexuality and gender history, as well as public history. Brier wrote Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Response to the AIDS Crisis (UNC, 2009) and organized and guest edited, “HIV/AIDS in US History: Interchange,” the first article-length piece on HIV/AIDS for the Journal of American History. She has curated numerous historical exhibitions, including Out in Chicago, for the Chicago History Museum, “Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture,” a traveling exhibition for the National Library of Medicine, and “I’m Still Surviving,” a transmedia living women’s history of HIV/AIDS.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture, Traveling Exhibition and Web Gallery for the National Library of Medicine, October 2012-May 2013 (travels 2013-2018); translated into Spanish, bilingual traveling show and website (2020 to present). I’m Still Surviving, www.stillsurviving.net
Brier, J. (2018). I’m Still Surviving: Oral Histories of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Chicago. Oral History Review, 45(1), 68–83. Special Issue on Decentering and Decolonizing Feminist Oral History.
Brier, J. (2017). HIV/AIDS in US History: Interchange. Journal of American History, 104(2), 431–460. Guest editor and contributor.
Brier, J. (2009). Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis. University of North Carolina Press.
Jih-Fei Cheng is Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College. Previously, he worked in HIV/AIDS social services, behavioral research, and prevention education in Los Angeles and New York City. He has served as a steering committee or board member for various organizations addressing queer and trans of color communities, including The HIV League. He’s completing his first book manuscript, Materialist Virology, which historicizes the knowledge produced about viruses in the context of racial capitalism, Euro-American settler colonialism, and US military empire. Cheng’s second project examines the histories and translations of genetics across Anglophone and Sinophone contexts.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Cheng, J.-F. (2015) ‘El tabaco se ha mulato’: Globalizing Race, Viruses, and Scientific Observation in the Late Nineteenth Century. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience., 1(1), 1–41.
Cheng, J.-F. (2016). How to Survive: AIDS and Its Afterlives in Popular Media. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 44(1-2), 73-92.
Cheng, J.-F., Juhasz, A., & Shahani, N. (Eds.). (2020). AIDS and the Distribution of Crises. Duke University Press.
Cheng, J.-F. (2021). Keeping it on the Download: The Viral Afterlives of Paris Is Burning. In K. Adeyemi, R. H. Rivera-Servera, & K. Khubchandani (Eds.), Queer Nightlife (pp. 325–354). University of Michigan Press.
Cheng, J.-F. (2021) Cold Blood: HIV/AIDS and the Global Blood Biotechnology Industry. Radical History Review, Issue 140: The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over, 143-150.
Marika Cifor, PhD, (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Information School and adjunct faculty in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. Her research investigates how people marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and HIV-status are represented and how they document and represent themselves, uncovering how archives and digital technologies and cultures are shaping identities, experiences, and social movements. Cifor is the author of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), co-editor of a First Monday special issue on ‘HIV/AIDS and Digital Media,' and has published widely on HIV and AIDS documentation, memory, and cultures. She is working on a second book on buyer’s clubs in and beyond the AIDS pandemic.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Cifor, M. (2022). Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS. University of Minnesota Press.
Cifor, M. (2023). Viral Generations. Feminist Formations, 35(3), 221–231.
McKinney, C., & Cifor, M. (2022). On digital models: Responding to viral metaphors in pandemic times. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 8(2).
Cifor, M. (2021). What is remembered lives: Time and the disruptive animacy of archiving AIDS on Instagram. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 27(2), 371–394.
Cifor, M., & McKinney, C. (2020). Reclaiming HIV/AIDS in digital media studies. First Monday, 25(10).
Lisa Diedrich is professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Her research and teaching interests are in critical health studies, disability studies, feminist science studies, critical pedagogies, and graphic medicine. She is the author of Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism; Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism; and Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness. The collection Keywords/Keyimages in Graphic Medicine (co-edited with Briana Martino) is forthcoming from Penn State University Press in 2026.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Diedrich, L. (2024). Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism. University of Minnesota Press.
Diedrich, L. (2016). Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism. University of Minnesota Press.
Diedrich, L. (2007). Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness. University of Minnesota Press.
Diedrich, L. (2023). “Towards an AIDS ARCHIVE”: Homesickness and Homemaking in Marika Cifor’s Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS. Feminist Formations, 35(3), 153–161.
Diedrich, L. (2004). “Without us all told”: Paul Monette’s vigilant witnessing to the AIDS crisis. Literature and Medicine, 23(1), 112–127.
René Esparza is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His research delves into the intersection of racial and sexual politics within urban spaces, particularly focusing on their implications for public health. He is the author of the forthcoming book From Vice to Nice: Race, Sex, and the Gentrification of AIDS, which investigates how HIV prevention strategies in the 1980s intersected with the gentrification of low-income neighborhoods and the policing of communities of color in the upper Midwest. Esparza's work has been featured in various publications, including Radical History Review, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Journal of African American History.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Esparza, R. (2022). ‘We Lived as Do Spouses’: AIDS, Neoliberalism, and Family-Based Apartment Succession Rights in 1980s New York City. Journal of History of Sexuality, 31(1), 59–88.
Esparza, R. (2021). Qué Bonita Mi Tierra: Latinx AIDS Activism and Decolonial Queer Praxis in 1980s New York and Puerto Rico. Radical History Review, 140, 107–141.
Esparza, R. (2019). Black Bodies on Lockdown: AIDS Moral Panic and the Criminalization of HIV in Times of White Injury. The Journal of African American History, 104(2), 250–280.
Alex Fialho is an art historian and curator whose dissertation animates AIDS-related art histories through the lens of African American artists Darrel Ellis, Lola Flash, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Kia LaBeija. Fialho worked as Programs Director of Visual AIDS from 2014–2019 and conducted oral histories for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project with fifteen cultural producers including Douglas Crimp, Nan Goldin, and Julie Tolentino. Fialho was a 2023–2024 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Based in Los Angeles, Fialho was a 2024–2025 Predoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute and is the 2025–2026 Luce/ACLS Ellen Holtzman Dissertation Fellow in American Art. Fialho identifies as a white, queer, HIV-negative, cisgender person (he/they). Their work intends to be in service and support of queer, femme, Black and anti-racist creative practices.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Athey, R., Blake, N., Bordowitz, G., Crimp, D., Gangitano, L., Goldin, N., Harris, L. A., Jacobson, B., Moore, P., Pierson, J., Terrill, J., Tolentino, J., Waters, J., Van Cook, M., & Yamaoka, C. (2016). Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project. (A. Fialho, Interviewer) [Interview]. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Fialho, A. (2024). Vantage Points: On Alice Neel and AIDS. In H. Als (Ed.), At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World. David Zwirner Gallery.
WWHIVDD, Brier, J., Bhaman, S., Fialho, A., Hebert, P., Kerr, ted, Juhasz, A., & Polk, O. R. (2023). When we’re coming from: What Would an HIV Doula Do? on Pandemic Time(s). Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 44(1), 122–150.
Fialho, A. (2017, November 29). Visual AIDS statement on the Tacoma Action Collective: Direct action and interventions matter. Visual AIDS.
Fialho, A. (2013). SAFE SEX BANG: A Collection of Communities & Creatives in the Wake of AIDS. In C. Queen, A. Fialho, & D. Katz (Eds.), Safe Sex Bang: The Buzz Bense Collection of Safe Sex Posters. (pp. 21–31). Center for Sex & Culture.
Nic Flores, a queer Latinx writer and scholar, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS), the Women & Gender in Global Perspectives Program (WGGP), and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He specializes in public and sexual health, sexuality studies, and comparative ethnic and racial studies, with additional interests in Science and Technology Studies. His ethnographic research on HIV prevention explores the impacts of the biomedical intervention known as “PrEP” on Black and Latinx communities in the United States Midwest. His work has appeared in edited collections, and he is currently preparing several articles for publication. Nic’s first book manuscript, Becoming HIV-Negative, is currently under contract with the University of Minnesota Press.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Flores, Nic. (forthcoming). Becoming HIV-Negative. University of Minnesota Press
Flores, N. (2023). Learning How to Fuck on PrEP. In A. Spieldenner & J. Escoffier (Eds.), A Pill for Promiscuity (pp. 65–71). Rutgers University Press.
Spieldenner, A., & Flores, N. (2021). Sweet Nothings: A Journey of (Gay) Sex without Condoms. In A. Cooke-Jackson & V. Rubinsky (Eds.), Communicating Intimate Health (pp. 3–17). Lexington Books.
Martin French, Associate Professor in Concordia University's Department of Sociology & Anthropology, is a sociologist who studies the social dimensions of technology with an empirical focus on communications & information technology (CIT). His research emphasizes the broader social and political contexts of CIT, focusing especially on risk, surveillance, privacy, and social justice. In his current research, he examines how people and organizations use surveillance and other risk-management techniques to identify and address risks. A key focal point of this current work involves the critical analysis of HIV surveillance assemblages, highlighting how surveillance systems may amplify forms of systemic dis/advantage.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Hastings, C., French, M., McClelland, A., Mykhalovskiy, E., Adam, B., Bisaillon, L., Bogosavljevic, K., Gagnon, M., Greene, S., Guta, A., Hindmarch, S., Kaida, A., Kilty, J., Massaquoi, N., Namaste, V., O’Byrne, P., Orsini, M., Patterson, S., Sanders, C., Symington, A., & Wilson, C. (2023). Criminal Code Reform of HIV Non-Disclosure is Urgently Needed: Social Science Perspectives on the Harms of HIV Criminalization in Canada. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 115, 8–14.
Spieldenner, A., French, M., Ray, V., Minalga, B., Sardina, C., Suttle, R., Castro-Bojorquez, M., Lewis, O., & Sprague, L. (2022). The Meaningful Involvement of People Living with HIV/AIDS (MIPA): The Participatory Praxis Approach to Community Engagement on HIV Surveillance. Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, 14(2), 1–11.
French, M., Guta, A., Gagnon, M., Mykhalovskiy, E., Roberts, S. L., Goh, S., McClelland, A., & McKelvey, F. (2022). Corporate contact tracing as a pandemic response. Critical Public Health, 32(1), 48–55.
French, M. (2015). Counselling Anomie: Clashing Governmentalities of HIV Criminalisation and Prevention. Critical Public Health, 25(4), 427–440.
French, M. (2009). Woven of War-Time Fabrics: The Globalization of Public Health Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 6(2), 101–115.
Octavio R. González is Barbara Morris Caspersen Associate Professor of Humanities and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley College. His research focuses on two main areas: Critical HIV/AIDS studies and the cultural politics of risk, including queer subcultures; and transatlantic Modernism, including the Harlem Renaissance, the 20th-C. novel, and queer literature before and after Stonewall. González is the author of Misfit Modernism (Penn State UP, 2020), and two poetry collections: Limerence (Queer Mojo/Rebel Satori, 2023) and The Book of Ours (Letras Latinas/U of Notre Dame, 2009).
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
González, O. (2019). PrEP, the ‘Truvada Whore,’ and the New Gay Sexual Revolution. In R. Varghese (Ed.), RAW: PrEP, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Barebacking. (pp. 47–70). University of Regina Press.
González, O. (2010). Tracking the bugchaser: Giving The Gift of HIV/AIDS. Cultural Critique, 75(1), 82–113.
González, O. (2012). Review Essay of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking by Tim Dean (Chicago, 2009). Cultural Critique, 81(1), 125–133.
Charlie Hahn is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. His dissertation project examines the use of scientific information technologies in projects of social activism and advocacy, focused primarily on Indigenous ecological and health contexts. He has also contributed previously to a study of long term HIV/AIDS scientific research infrastructures. Along with participating, he is also serving as a graduate assistant for year one of the Knowledge of AIDS network.
Poyao Huang is an assistant professor at the Institute of Health Behaviors, National Taiwan University. Huang received his Ph.D. in Communication and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Huang was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University (2020–2021) and the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (2021). He works at the intersection of science and technology studies, queer studies, and media studies, focusing on health disparities and the material and visual culture of HIV/AIDS in the inter-Asian context.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Huang, P. (2023). Sexual health as surplus: the marketization of PrEP in Taiwan. BioSocieties, 18(2), 410–428.
Huang, P., Du, S. C., Ku, S. W. W., Li, C. W., Bourne, A., & Strong, C. (2023). An object-oriented analysis of social apps, syringes and ARTs within gay Taiwanese men’s chemsex practices. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 1–16.
Huang, P. (2024). Design as sexual practice: The visual culture of social apps and HIV risk in Taiwan. Sexualities, 27(3), 653–674.
Antoine S. Johnson is a historian of medicine whose research interests include Black health activism, the AIDS epidemic, and anti-Black racism in medicine. He is an Assistant Professor of African American & African Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled More than Pushing Pills: Black AIDS Activism in the Bay Area.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Johnson, A. (2020, June 15). From HIV-AIDS to COVID-19: Black Vulnerability and Medical Uncertainty. AAIHS Black Perspectives.
Johnson, A., Mitchell, E. A., & Nuriddin, A. (2020, August 12). Syllabus: A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine. AAIHS Black Perspectives.
Johnson, A. (2022). Review of Dan Royles' To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS. H-Sci-Med-Tech.
Dr. Jallicia Jolly is a writer, poet, and reproductive justice organizer who is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University's Center on Transnational Policing and the Effron Center for the Study of America. Dr. Jolly merges community-based research on Black women's health, grassroots activism, and transnational political leadership with reproductive justice organizing and practice in the United States and the Caribbean. A 2025 National Academy of Sciences U.S. Kavli Fellow, Dr. Jolly is the founder and director of the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity, and HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Collective—an interdisciplinary, medical humanities lab that bridges research, advocacy, student collaborations, and high-impact learning experiences on the health and movement-building of Afro-diasporic girls, women, and gender diverse people. Dr. Jolly’s first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS (University of California Press, Forthcoming 2026), is an ethnography of the reproductive justice organizing of young Black Jamaican women living and loving with HIV that chronicles their everyday confrontations with illness, reproductive violence, and inequality in neocolonial Jamaica.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Jolly, J. (2021). At the Crossroads: Caribbean Women & (Black) Feminist Ethnography in the Time of HIV/AIDS. Feminist Anthropology, 2(2), 224–241.
Jolly, J. (2020). From “At Risk” to Interdependent: The Erotic Life Worlds of HIV+ Jamaican Women. Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society., 21(2–3), 107–131.
Jolly, J. (2021). From HIV/AIDS to COVID-19: A Reproductive Justice Lens to Pandemics. The Lancet: The Art of Medicine, 398(10315), 1958–1959.
Jolly, J. (2022). Theorizing Agency: New Directions in Research on HIV/AIDS Activism. American Quarterly, 74(1), 169–180.
Jarrett L. Joubert is a doctoral candidate at the Center for Biology and Society in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, where he studies history and philosophy of science. His research examines how scientific communities responded to the HIV/AIDS crisis through the development of novel pharmaceutical compounds. He has previously contributed to the Embryo Project Encyclopedia, an online resource devoted to expanding scientific literacy around topics of developmental biology and reproduction, and has written entries related to HIV/AIDS.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Joubert, J. (2024). "The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials” (1995), by Steven Epstein. In Embryo Project Encyclopedia. ISSN: 1940-5030 Pending
Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is a Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She is the author of scholarly books on AIDS including AIDS TV (Duke, 1995) and We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (with Ted Kerr, Duke, 2022). She has been making AIDS activist video since 1987’s, Women and AIDS (with Jean Carlomusto for the Living with AIDS Show). She is currently completing the feature AIDS documentary, Please Hold, which asks: How does mourning, haunting, and memory change across time and tech?
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications and media:
Juhasz, A., & Kerr, T. (2022). We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production. Duke University Press.
Cheng, J.-F., Juhasz, A., & Shahani, N. (Eds.). (2020). AIDS and the Distribution of Crises. Duke University Press.
Juhasz, A. (1995). AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video. Duke University Press.
Juhasz, A. (2005). Video Remains. [Video recording].
Juhasz, A., and Szczepanski, J.M. (2023). I Want to Leave a Legacy: The video/activism of Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski. [Video recording].
Theodore (ted) Kerr is a writer and organizer. He is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (with Alexandra Juhasz, Duke University Press, 2022). He is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?. Kerr curated AIDS, Posters, and Stories of Public Health: A People’s History of a Pandemic, a travelling and online exhibition, for the US National Library of Medicine. Kerr performed 10 interviews for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art's Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Juhasz, A., & Kerr, T. (2022). We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production. Duke University Press.
Kerr, T. (2019). What You Don’t Know About AIDS Could Fill A Museum: Curatorial Ethics and the Ongoing Epidemic in the 21st Century. On Curating, 42.
Kerr, T. (2016). AIDS 1969: HIV, History, and Race. Drain Magazine.
Kerr, T. (2019, June 15). How to Have an AIDS Memorial in an Epidemic. C Mag.
Kerr, T. (2021, September 27). Embracing What We Know and Don’t Know About Robert Rayford. TheBody.
Alexander McClelland (he/him) is based on the unceded Algonquin territory of Ottawa, Canada, where his public-facing and community-engaged research program is focused on the intersection of life, law, and disease; he is an Associate Professor at Carleton University's Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice. As someone living with HIV, he aims to develop knowledge to support the realization of bodily autonomy for HIV-positive and other socially marginalized people. Bringing together critical criminology, anarchist studies, surveillance studies, feminist social research, and critical public health, McClelland’s work attends to understanding the impacts of criminalization processes and communicable disease surveillance.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
McClelland, A. (2024). Criminalized Lives: HIV and Legal Violence. Rutgers University Press.
Hastings, C., McClelland, A., Guta, A., Owino, M., Manning, E., Orsini, M., Elliot, R., Gagnon, M., & Molldrem, S. (2021). Intersections of treatment, surveillance, and criminal law responses to HIV and COVID-19. American Journal of Public Health, 11(7), 1252–1254.
Bernard, E. J., McClelland, A., Cardell, B., Chung, C., Castro-Bojorquez, M., French, M., Hursey, D., Khanna, N., Minalga, B., Spieldenner, A., & Strub, S. (2020). We Are People, Not Clusters! The American Journal of Bioethics, 20(10), 1–4.
McClelland, A. (2019). “Lock This Whore Up”: Legal violence and flows of information precipitating personal violence against people criminalized for HIV-related crimes in Canada. European Journal of Risk Regulation; Special Issue on Big Data and Risk Regulation, 10(1), 132–147.
McClelland, A., Guta, A., & Gagnon, M. (2020). The rise of molecular surveillance: Ethical, criminalization & rights implications. Critical Public Health, 30(4), 487–493.
Claire McDonald Indermaur is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington's Information School. Their research draws upon and contributes to trans studies, science and technology studies, archival studies, and critical health/medical rhetoric.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Cifor, M., & McDonald, C. (2023). “I hope we leave more of a record”: Radical queer care within and for the AIDS INFO BBS’s caregivers mailing list. Feminist Media Histories, 9(1), 78–97.
Cait McKinney is the author of I Know You Are, but What Am I? On Pee-wee Herman (Minnesota 2024) and Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke 2020), winner of the Gertrude Robinson Best Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBTQ studies. McKinney is an Associate Professor in Simon Fraser University's School of Communication. McKinney's HIV/AIDS scholarship focuses on activism, computing, and the internet, and has been published in Communication, Culture, and Critique, First Monday, Catalyst, Feminist Media Histories, Continuum, and the edited collection AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke 2020).
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Mulvin, D., & McKinney, C. (2023). The Girl in the Bubble: An Essay on Containment. Catalyst, 9(1), 1–25.
McKinney, C., & Mulvin, D. (2023). High-Touch Media: Caring Practices at the Deaf AIDS Information Center. Feminist Media Histories, 9(1), 98–122.
McKinney, C., & Cifor, M. (2022). On Digital Models: Responding to Viral Metaphors in Pandemic Times. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 8(2).
McKinney, C. (2020). Crisis Infrastructures: AIDS Activism Meets Internet Regulation. In J.-F. Cheng, A. Juhasz, & N. Shahani (Eds.), AIDS and the Distribution of Crises. (pp. 162–182). Duke University Press.
McKinney, C., & Mulvin, D. (2019). Bugs: Rethinking the History of Computing. Communication, Culture, and Critique, 12(4), 476–498.
Stephen Molldrem, PhD (he/him) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in the Institute for Bioethics and Health Humanities. He is a qualitative social researcher, health policy analyst, and ethnographer situated in Science and Technology Studies (STS), public health ethics, sexuality studies, and critical data studies. His scholarship on HIV/AIDS has included ethnographic research and other qualitative studies about transformations in the US federal policy paradigms that govern the management of HIV in the era of treatment-as-prevention. This work includes ongoing projects about the integration of US HIV public health data infrastructures as part of the implementation of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy as well as analyses of social movement dynamics and ethical issues stemming from new approaches to HIV surveillance. Learn more on his website and find his CV here.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Molldrem, S., & Smith, A. K. J. (2023). Health Policy Counterpublics: Enacting Collective Resistances to US Molecular HIV Surveillance and Cluster Detection and Response Programs. Social Studies of Science, 1–27.
Molldrem, S. (2023). HIV Data as Queer Data: Biomedical Sexualities, Treatment-as-Prevention, and the New Sex Hierarchy for People Living with HIV. In P. Keilty (Ed.), Queer Data Studies (pp. 128–154). University of Washington Press.
Molldrem, S., Smith, A. K. J., & McClelland, A. (2023). Predictive Analytics in HIV Surveillance Require New Approaches to Data Ethics, Rights, and Regulation in Public Health. Critical Public Health, 33(3), 275–281.
Molldrem, S., & Smith, A. K. J. (2020). Reassessing the Ethics of Molecular HIV Surveillance in the Era of Cluster Detection and Response: Toward HIV Data Justice. The American Journal of Bioethics, 20(10), 10–23.
Molldrem, S. (2020). How to Build an HIV out of Care Watch List: Remaking HIV Surveillance in the Era of Treatment as Prevention. First Monday, 20(10).
Dean Murphy is a Senior Research Fellow and leads the HIV program at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society. He is currently leading an Australian Research Council Discovery grant that is undertaking a critical analysis of the global policy of ending HIV/AIDS as a public threat by 2030 (and its operationalization in different settings). His current work also focuses on HIV biomedical technologies, HIV seroconversion and diagnosis, HIV-related stigma, experiences of sexual health and well-being, and the meanings of drug consumption. His book, Gay Men Pursuing Parenthood Through Surrogacy: Reconfiguring Kinship, was published in 2015.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Murphy, D., Race, K., Pienaar, K., & Lea, T. (2024). Remaking chemsex event-networks in the era of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Body & Society.
Race, K., Murphy, D., Pienaar, K., & Lea, T. (2023). Injecting as a sexual practice: Cultural formations of ‘slamsex’. Sexualities, 26(5–6), 620–637.
Murphy, D., Ellard, J., Maher, L., Saxton, P., Holt, M., Haire, B., & Prestage, G. (2022). How to have sex in a pandemic: the development of strategies to prevent COVID-19 transmission in sexual encounters among gay and bisexual men in Australia. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 1–16.
Rosengarten, M., & Murphy, D. (2019). A Wager on the Future: A Practicable Response to HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) and the stubborn fact of process. Social Theory & Health, 18, 1–15.
Murphy, D., Philpot, S., Brown, G., & Prestage, G. (2021). Domestic mobility and experiences of disconnection from sexual health care among gay and bisexual men in Australia: insights from a qualitative study. Sexual Health, 18(6), 508–511.
Michael Nebeling Petersen is a lecturer in the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics and an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the Center for Gender, Sexuality and Difference at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has especially studied homosexual culture and citizenship, new technologies of reproduction and kinship as well as digital media and mediated cultures of intimacy – in particular, in the intersections between sexuality, gender, whiteness, and national belonging. Currently, he is PI for the collaborative interdisciplinary project The Cultural History of AIDS in Denmark, that aims to write the Danish history of AIDS and examines how AIDS emerged, became signified and became embedded in Danish culture from 1981-2000.
The Cultural History of AIDS in Denmark website
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Nebeling Petersen, M., Wung-Sung, T., Larsen, B. F., Eriksen, C. B., & Bissenbakker, M. (2024). AIDS. Aids-krisens danske historie. [The Danish history of AIDS]. Gads Forlag.
Nebeling Petersen, M., Bissenbakker, M., & Eriksen, C. B. (Eds.). (2023). Kvinder, Køn & Forskning [Women, Gender & Research], 23(1). Special issue: Skandinaviske hiv/aids-historier [Scandinavian HIV/AIDS stories].
Nebeling Petersen, M., Wung-Sung, T. F., Sandset, T., Larsen, B. F., Møller, K., & Bissenbakker, M. (2023). En introduktion til en skandinavisk hiv/aids-historie [An introduction to a Scandinavian history of HIV/AIDS]. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 23(1), 7–20.
Nebeling Petersen, M., & Nielsen, A. H. (2023). Danske aids-kampagners repræsentation af hiv/aids 1983-1996 [The representations of HIV/AIDS in Danish AIDS campaigns 1983-1996]. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 23(1), 80–101.
David Ribes (he/him) is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) and director of the Data Ecologies Lab (deLAB) at the University of Washington. He is a sociologist of science and technology who focuses on the development and sustainability of research infrastructures (i.e., networked information technologies for the support of interdisciplinary science); their relation to long-term changes in the conduct of science; and, transformations in objects of research. David is a regular contributor to the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Information Studies. His book (to be published in early 2026), Machineries of Similarity and Difference: AIDS From Its Research Infrastructures is a sociotechnical inspection of the concept of interoperability, tracking the trajectory of three HIV/AIDS cohort studies as they combined over three decades.
Personal website
Data Ecologies Lab (deLAB) website
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Ribes, D. (2017). Notes on the Concept of Data Interoperability: Cases from an Ecology of AIDS Research Infrastructures. CSCW ’17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 1514–1526.
Ribes, D., & Polk, J. B. (2015). Organizing for ontological change: The kernel of an AIDS research infrastructure. Social Studies of Science, 45(2), 214–241.
Ribes, D., & Polk, J. B. (2014). Flexibility Relative to What? Change to Research Infrastructure. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 15(5), 287–305.
Ribes, D. (2026). Machineries of Similarity and Difference: AIDS From Its Research Infrastructures. MIT Press.
Emily Lim Rogers is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She works on how people navigate uncertainty in the context of emergent diseases with deficits of biomedical knowledge. Her first book, Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness (forthcoming 2026 from Duke University Press) is on patient activism and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Her second project turns to the ambivalent politics of what lives under the description “alternative medicine” in the US. Currently she is researching AIDS activists who chose to pursue non-pharmaceutical treatments, and how they politicized their decision-making through a critique of Western biomedicine.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Rogers, E. L. (2023). Illness, Endurance, and Proximities of AIDS Activism. Feminist Formations, 35(3), 162–169.
Dan Royles is an Associate Professor of History at Binghamton University, where he teaches courses on United States, African American, LGBTQ, public, and oral history. His first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, was published in 2020 by University of North Carolina Press. He is also a co-lead for the Miami AIDS Memorials Project.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Royles, D. (2020). To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS. University of North Carolina Press.
Royles, D. (2022). ‘Fuck the Gay Movement’: Dissemblance and Desire in a Black AIDS Activist Oral History. In C. Summerskill, A. Murphy, & E. Vickers (Eds.), New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Disruption. Routledge.
Royles, D., & Hobson, E. (Eds.). (2021). Radical History Review special issue: The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over. (140).
Royles, D. (2019, October). Tales from Behind the Wall: ACT UP/Philadelphia and HIV in Prisons. Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography, 143(3).
Royles, D. (2022, July 28). America Responds to Monkeypox: Learning from the History of HIV/AIDS. Nursing Clio.
Tony Sandset, PhD, is a Researcher at the University of Oslo, Faculty of Medicine. His work focuses on the politics of HIV/AIDS prevention and, in particular, on issues around health equity, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. He has conducted research on the discourse around 'ending AIDS' as well as research on PrEP and now also on long-term survivors of HIV and aging with HIV in Norway. He is particularly interested in the intersection of expertise, knowledge, and power and how such concepts can be used as analytical devices in HIV/AIDS research.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Sandset, T. (2024). ‘Ending AIDS’ between comparison and commensuration and the role of global health indicators. Global Public Health, 19(1).
Sandset, T., Villadsen, K., Heggen, K., & Engebretsen, E. (2021). Discipline for pleasure: a new governmentality of HIV prevention. BioSocieties, 18, 102–127.
Nagington, M., & Sandset, T. (2020). Putting the NHS England on trial: uncertainty-as-power, evidence and the controversy of PrEP in England. Medical Humanities, 46(3), 176–179.
Joseph Jay Sosa is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, where their research and teaching focuses on queer aesthetics and sexual governmentality in Brazil and the U.S. Jay is the author of Brazil’s Sex Wars: The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo (Texas 2024) and is currently researching the social history and chemical agency of poppers (alkyl nitrite inhalants), including moral panics over poppers during the AIDS crisis.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Sosa, J.J. (2024). Brazil’s Sex Wars: The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo. University of Texas Press.
Andrew Spieldenner (he/him) (Ph.D., Howard University) is Executive Director of MPact Global Action and Professor of Health Communication at California State University-San Marcos. Dr. Spieldenner is a community-engaged researcher and advocate with 30 years of experience in HIV. Openly living with HIV, Dr. Spieldenner is currently on the Developed Countries Delegation to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He is the author of multiple articles and co-editor of the books Intercultural Health Communication (Peter Lang, 2020), Post-AIDS Discourse in Health Communication (Routledge, 2022) and A Pill for Promiscuity (Rutgers, 2023).
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Spieldenner, A., & Escoffier, J. (Eds.). (2023). A Pill for Promiscuity: Gay Sex in a Pharmaceutical Age. Rutgers University Press.
Spieldenner, A., & Patton, C. (2023). Funny thing about pandemics: Queer histories, interventions and communities in HIV, COVID-19 and mpox. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 10(1), 191–201.
Spieldenner, A., French, M., Ray, V., Minalga, B., Sardina, C., Suttle, R., Castro-Bojorquez, M., Lewis, O., & Sprague, L. (2022). The Meaningful Involvement of People Living with HIV/AIDS (MIPA): The Participatory Praxis Approach to Community Engagement on HIV Surveillance. Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, 14(2), 1–11.
Basu, A., Spieldenner, A., & Dillon, P. (Eds.). (2022). Post-AIDS Discourse in Health Communication: Sociocultural Interpretations. Routledge.
Spieldenner, A., Sprague, L., Hampton, A., Smith-Davis, M., Peavy, D., Bagchi, A., Cardell, B., Johnson, V., Brown, G., & Brewer, R. (2019). From consumer to community-based researcher: Lessons from the PLHIV Stigma Index. In P. M. Kellet (Ed.), Narrating Patienthood: Engaging Diverse Voices on Health, Communication, and the Patient Experience. (pp. 151–166). Lexington Press.
Vishnu Subrahmanyam (he/they) is a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas Medical Branch whose interests converge around Critical HIV Studies, Feminist STS of Care, and Queer notions of Love and Forgiveness. He is also invested in incorporating community-led research practices into his work and has prior experience working with queer populations and people in sex work in Southern India.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Molldrem, S., Smith, A. K. J., & Subrahmanyam, V. (2024). Toward consent in molecular HIV surveillance?: Perspectives of critical stakeholders. AJOB Empirical Bioethics, 15(1), 66–79.
Mairead Sullivan is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Sullivan is the author of Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer. Sullivan’s work sits at the nexus of feminist and queer cultural studies and public health. They are currently writing a book on the herpes virus as a case study to understand the cultural impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the context of sexual health.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Sullivan, M. (2018). A crisis emerges: Lesbian health between breast cancer and HIV/AIDS. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 22(2), 220–234.
Sullivan, M. (2023). Intersectionality and Its Limits: Quantitative Public Health and the Epidemiology of Sexually Transmitted Infections. In J. C. Nash & S. Pinto (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities. (1st ed., pp. 412–419). Routledge.
Sullivan, M. (2022). Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger between Feminist and Queer. University Of Minnesota Press.
Boehmer, U., Clark, M., Glickman, M., Timm, A., Sullivan, M., Bradford, J., & Bowen, D. J. (2010). Using Cancer Registry Data for Recruitment of Sexual Minority Women: Successes and Limitations. Journal of Women’s Health, 19(7), 1289–1297.
Rothman, E. F., Sullivan, M., Keyes, S., & Boehmer, U. (2012). Parents’ Supportive Reactions to Sexual Orientation Disclosure Associated With Better Health: Results From a Population-Based Survey of LGB Adults in Massachusetts. Journal of Homosexuality, 59(2), 186–200.
Lynn M. Thomas is the Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington. She is adjunct in Anthropology and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. Thomas is the author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (2003) and Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (2020), and a co-editor of The Modern Girl Around the World (2008) and Love in Africa (2009). She teaches a course on the Global History of AIDS. Her current research examines the transnational history of abortion between Kenya and the United States since the 1960s.
Selected social studies of HIV/AIDS publications:
Thomas, L. M. (2017, July 7). Gag rules and global partnerships. Africa Is a Country.
Cole, J., & Thomas, L. M. (Eds.). (2009). Love in Africa. The University of Chicago Press.
Thomas, L. M. (2003). Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. University of California Press.
Maile Aihua Young is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research examines the post-1945 development of global public health culture through epidemiology and Asian diasporic literature. Reconsidering the limitations of how epidemiology constructs race, territory, and life as fixed categories, they track how the Asian figure has been interpellated through disease in scientific and cultural production to imagine an Asian American life not at odds with disease. They also serve as the co-convener for the Asian/American Studies Collective and the graduate assistant at the Health Justice and Community Initiative.
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