This panel discussion brings together academics from different disciplinary backgrounds—clinical psychology, social policy, public health—to present their research on HIV, stigma, and activist/academic strategies of resistance.
Addressing topics ranging from HIV criminalisation and mental health, to international HIV/AIDS policies, and the relationship between gender, menopause, and living with HIV, this interdisciplinary panel seeks to foster dialogue about the ongoing epidemic.
The speakers will link the affective life of HIV stigma to its political, personal, and activist life. Doing so, they ask: In what ways is this stigma gendered and raced? How have researchers and activists accounted for the gendered, affective, and political life of HIV? And what does the future of clinical and policy intervention look like?
Aaron Samuel Breslow, PhD is a Licensed Psychologist in New York State and a postdoctoral Research Fellow in Health Disparities and Multicultural Mental Health at Harvard Medical School and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is also a Behavioral Health Fellow at the Einstein-Rockefeller-CUNY Center for AIDS Research and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Dr. Breslow received his PhD in Counseling Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University and completed his pre-doctoral clinical training at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center and Montefiore Medical Center. His research aims to identify strategies to promote LGBTQ+ health and mitigate the psychological burdens of HIV stigma and criminalization. He received his BA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Brandeis University and is Co-Founder of Queer Anga, a community-based wellness collective in Brooklyn, New York.
Dr Hakan Seckinelgin is Associate Professor at the LSE Department of Social Policy. He is a political theorist who has developed a multidisciplinary research programme by combining theoretical work with empirical studies. He is not happy to restrict looking for answers within limited disciplinary perspectives, because people do not live lives that are compartmentalized by disciplinary concerns. He is interested in analysing the ways in which different contexts (different ideological, social, political and cultural levels) create the conditions for policy development and how these lead to a variety of implications for people and their experiences of equalities, inequalities and their participation in their communities. More thematically he works: on HIV and AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa considering the development, implementation and implications of international AIDS policies; on nature of knowledge and evidence used by global policy actors; on contextual determinants of policy relevant knowledge; on sexualities and LGBT activism in different contexts; and theories and politics of civil society. His work provides an epistemological shift in thinking about policy processes and their outcomes from the perspective of people’s experiences. This approach aims to valorise experience based knowledge as part of our assessments of needs, policies and policy implementations.
Dr Shema Tariq is a Postdoctoral Clinical Research Fellow at UCL’s Institute for Global Health, and Honorary Consultant HIV Physician at Mortimer Market Centre. Her main area of interest is the reproductive and post-reproductive health of women living with HIV, and the representation of women in HIV research. Shema is trained in both epidemiology and medical anthropology, and has particular expertise in mixed-methods public health research. Her academic experience includes doctoral research exploring women’s engagement with HIV care in the UK during pregnancy, and a Fulbright Scholarship to Columbia University to analyse cohort data on late HIV diagnosis in KwaZulu-Natal. She is Vice-Chair of the British HIV Association’s HIV and pregnancy Guidelines Writing Committee, Vice-Chair of SWIFT (a national knowledge network for research in HIV and women) and Trustee of Positively UK, the UK's leading HIV peer support charity. Shema is currently Chief Investigator of the PRIME Study, an NIHR-funded study investigating the impact of the menopause on the health and well-being of women living with HIV, and co-investigator on the EPSRC-funded project INTUIT looking at the use of patient-generated data in HIV.
Dr Jacob Breslow is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality at LSE Gender. His primary area of research is on contemporary U.S. social justice movements, and the ways in which the idea of childhood operates within and against them. Specifically, this work interrogates and thinks with Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and anti-deportation movements. His second line of research is on transnational and local sexual politics, and the conceptual and lived effects of ameliorating sexual harms. In this body of work, he has written on social media’s outsourcing of content moderation and the production of the digital life of coloniality; and on the relationship between #MeToo and homonationalism. He is also working on a new project titled Queer Accommodations and Displacements, which combines analyses of local and everyday acts of making or denying spaces for queer subjects, with examinations of the political and psychic landscapes of these spatial politics.