Paper short abstract:

Through the 'HIV crisis', EUROPACH explores how the past is used in the unfolding of activism, policy and citizenship. As health-governing bodies promote a biomedical approach to prevention, EUROPACH asks how the past dwells within these structures so as to enable creative approaches to the future.

Paper long abstract:

Through the lens of the 'HIV/AIDS crisis', the EUROPACH project explores 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 dwells within these structures so as to enable creative and situated approaches 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 that emerge across shifting notions of Europe. Researchers will unpack the logics of policy discourses and disentangle the transnational histories involved in the co-production of these policy assemblages, and develop a corresponding interactive map for use beyond the project. They will also record interviews with actors in the field, which will provide a foundation for a 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 for insights as to new 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 integrating local communities, contexts and histories into European structures and praxes of citizenship.