Criminal Code reform of HIV non disclosure is urgently needed : Social science perspectives on the harms of HIV criminalization in Canada

The criminalization of HIV non-disclosure represents a significant issue of concern among people living with HIV, those working across the HIV sector, public health practitioners, and health and human rights advocates around the world. Recently, the government of Canada began a review of the criminal law regarding HIV non-disclosure and invited feedback from the public about potential reforms to the Criminal Code. In light of this public consultation, this commentary examines social science research from Canadian scholars that documents the intersecting damaging effects of HIV criminalization. Canadian social scientists and other researchers have shown that HIV criminalization is applied in uneven and discriminatory ways, impedes HIV prevention efforts, perpetuates HIV stigma, and has a damaging impact on the daily lives of people living with HIV. We argue that there is an urgent need for reforms that will significantly restrict how the criminal law is applied to HIV non-disclosure

Securing Health: HIV Securitization in the UN system

This dissertation examines the efficacy of securitization as a strategy for drawing attention and resources to an issue, with specific reference to the efforts of elite actors in the United Nations to position HIV as a security threat by placing it on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) agenda and thereby catalyse change in the global HIV response. The dissertation argues that while this move initially catalysed a far-reaching discussion, including calls for improved treatment access, the longer-term impact of international HIV securitization has been mixed. Although HIV securitization in the UN has come to include exceptional practices within the security sector, it did not have a significant effect on treatment access or the global response writ large. HIV securitization produced at once exceptional yet limited effects. To explain these effects, this dissertation first argues that HIV securitization in 2000 was deeply shaped by older racialized and gendered discourses about Africa, disease and security, and was constrained from the outset by these prior threat constructions. Second, it argues that threat construction is predicated on binary categories that produce difference, and then hierarchies based on that difference. This produces consistent constraints that shape subsequent threat response, rendering securitization inherently limited as a transformative strategy. The analysis is developed via a framework reimagining securitization as a policy process. Analytically, conceptualising securitization as a series of policy stages enables structured tracing of the origins, evolution and effects of securitization. Theoretically, the framework unites several strands of securitization theory, levels of analysis and categories of actors in a single framework. The conception of securitization as a policy process advances securitization theory by uniting discursive and practice-based approaches to securitization, but by illuminating inherent limitations of securitization as a means to emancipatory ends, it pushes theorists and practitioners to think and act beyond securitization.Ph.D.2016-06-17 00:00:0

Reimagining global health: From decolonisation to indigenization

In the wake of global racial justice and Indigenous sovereignty movements, there have been calls to decolonise global health as an academic discipline and set of policies, programmes, and practices. Identifying these calls for decolonisation of global health as both promising but limited, we argue that global health needs to engage in deeper critical reassessment of its ontological foundations in Western thought and that Indigenous ontologies have an important role to play in deconstructing and reimagining global health. We identify four Western ontological assumptions that are particularly relevant to global health and demonstrate how Indigenous ontologies assist in thinking outside of and beyond these assumptions, offering a path toward a reconstructed Indigenized imagining of global health