HIV-Risk Research and Homeless Sexual Minority Youth
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: While the prioritization of funding for HIV/AIDS research since the early 1980s has stimulated an unprecedented increase in studies of sexual and drug-using behavior, there has been insufficient ethnographic attention paid to the scientific practices that produce this knowledge. This project seeks to understand how epidemiological categories of sexual and drug-using ‘at-risk’ populations are constituted; a critical feature of this analysis examines how behavioral epidemiologists and the humans they study interact to produce scientific knowledge. Through anthropological methods of participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, informant journals, surveys, and archival, contemporary media and academic literature research, this project will investigate how these participants negotiate their differing epistemological frameworks within the research practices that produce such scientific knowledge. Specifically, the investigator is interviewing and observing the practices of HIV-risk behavioral epidemiologists who research homelessness, youth, illegal drug use, sex-selling, sex-trading and same-sex sexual behavior and continuing his ongoing fieldwork on the daily lives of homeless sexual minority youth and young adults (15-28) in San Francisco. In his participant observation of the daily lives of homeless youth and young adults, Mr. Peacock has routinely observed his informants alternately reject and embrace the identity categories, of ‘youth,’ ‘adult,’ ‘HIV+,’ ‘Hepatitis C+,’ ‘drug user,’ ‘addict,’ ‘homeless,’ ‘sex worker,’ ‘gay,’ ‘bisexual,’ ‘straight’ and ‘transgender.’ The behavioral theories most prevalent in American public health would frame these oscillations as denial or rejection of static or true identities due to stigma or mental illness. This applicant will expand the use of social worlds (Clarke 1999) and practice (Bourdieu 1978) theories to document cultural formations of youth and young adult identities by investigating his homeless informants’ sexual, drug using and income generating activities as alternative practices to mitigate the daily realities of urban poverty and create meaningful senses of social order. The applicant will use his fieldwork to investigate how these behaviors allow street youth to both draw upon and depart from behavioral norms to structure alternative notions of personhood and community. He will investigate HIV-risk as an area of daily practice and discourse through which traditional ideas of health, risk and person are challenged and either maintained or transformed to thereby see how the active researching and labeling of persons as members of an ‘HIV-risk’ groups functions within the daily lives and self-understandings of researchers and their human subjects. The broader impacts of his work include an original integration of practice theory, science and technology studies, urban anthropology and queer theory/lesbian and gay studies within an applied ethnography. His research will offer both practical knowledge useful to behavioral interventions for populations similar to his homeless informants as well as contribute to theory development within the behavioral sciences.