Citizenship and pleasure : a study on harm reduction assemblages in Poland

In 2013 and 2019 harm reduction projects were at the centre of attacks and smear campaigns coming from both the media and authorities in Poland. These programs were criticized for their alleged promotion of activities that were perceived as socially controversial (for example, sex work, drug use, and sex between men) and that went beyond a normative vision of 'good citizenship'. Drawing on public discussions provoked by the attacks on harm reduction projects, and embedding them in the history of HIV/AIDS activism in post-transition Poland, the article explores the ways in which pleasure is, or might be, embraced within the notion of citizenship - a citizenship that is understood in terms of subjects' rights and responsibilities. Based on extended fieldwork, including qualitative interviews with activists, experts, and people living with HIV, this article examines different strategies of enacting and navigating harm reduction activism in Poland by various actors. The article demonstrates that punitive political environments produce three strategies for responding to, framing, and managing pleasure. Hyperbolization and silencing are the two dominant strategies pursued by public institutions, the media, and politicians. The third strategy, skillful maneuvering, appears as a way of overcoming this opposition on the part of harm reduction activists

Maneuvering : practices in the HIV/AIDS policy worlds

Artykuł prezentuje praktyki działania związane z politykami HIV/AIDS, wprowadzając emiczną kategorię lawirowania. Lawirowanie oznacza, z jednej strony, ciągłe weryfikowanie, negocjowanie i potwierdzanie możliwości działania oraz ich granic w danym polu. Z drugiej uwypukla aktywną stronę zaangażowania, działanie "mimo" i w kontekście przeciwności. Autorka opiera rozważania na badaniach jakościowych. Wykorzystując antropologiczną koncepcję światów polityki jako metodę analizy i rozumienia pojęcia polityki społecznej, demonstruje, jak owe polityki są przeżywane, negocjowane i podtrzymywane przez różnych aktorów społecznych. Polem analizy są działania związane z używaniem prezerwatywy w profilaktyce oraz praktyki podejmowane w kontekście ograniczonych środków finansowych na działania społeczne.The article analyzes various activist practices in the field of HIV/AIDS policy in Poland by introducing an emic category of maneuvering (Pol. lawirowanie). On the one hand, maneuvering means constant verifying, negotiating and confirming the possibilities of taking action and their limits in a given field. On the other hand, the notion demonstrates active engagement, mobilizing and organizing against the odds as well as navigating in the field of the policy. The analysis is based on qualitative research (observation, oral history interviews and archival research) conducted among the activists and professionals working in the field of HIV/AIDS. The article applies an anthropological conceptual framework of "policy worlds" to examine how HIV/AIDS policies are lived, understood, negotiated and sustained by different social actors. The analysis is focused on prophylactic measures centered on condoms as well as the actions pursued in the context of limited financial resources

Disentangling the 1980s and 1990s in Poland : milestones and framework of HIV/AIDS policies

From an epidemiological perspective, Poland, as a low prevalence country, has never experienced an HIV/AIDS epidemic. The first diagnoses and attempts at shaping policy responses took place in the mid- and late 1980s, respectively. The history of creating HIV/AIDS policies in Poland (as throughout Central and Eastern Europe) is intertwined with the political, economic and cultural transformations from socialism to capitalism. That is the reason why I decided to address this period in my paper. The main research questions of this paper are: What are the key processes of HIV/AIDS policies development through the 1980s and 1990s in Poland, and how are they understood by various social actors? What have been the central ways of framing HIV/AIDS by emerging civil society organizations, in public policies and as part of initiatives by the Catholic Church? What language was (and specifically which terms and labels were) applied to build these frames at that time

Lesbians go public? Die (Un-)Sichtbarkeit von Lesben und bisexuellen Frauen in Polens öffentlichem Diskurs

"1989 erwies sich als Schlüsseljahr für das zivilgesellschaftliche Engagement in Polen. Die Demokratisierung der polnischen Gesellschaft ermöglichte es den BürgerInnen, sich in vielen Bereichen der Gesellschaft zu engagieren. Eine öffentlichkeitswirksame Hauptströmung der sozialen Bewegungen ist heute die LSBT-Bewegung (Lesben, Schwule, Bi- und Transsexuelle), die zwar keine Massenbewegung darstellt, aber das Thema der Anerkennung von Schwulen-, Lesben-, Bisexuellen- und Transgenderrechten in den öffentlichen Diskurs einbringt. Der Beitrag fragt nach dem Problem der 'Unsichtbarkeit' polnischer Lesben und bisexueller Frauen in den sozialen Bewegungen und im öffentlichen Raum. Genannt werden hierbei auch Ereignisse, die für die Entwicklung der lesbischen Identität und die Frauenemanzipation in Polen eine Schlüsselrolle spielten." (Autorenreferat)"1989 turned out to be a key year for civil society commitment in Poland. The democratization of Polish society allowed citizens to get involved in various parts of society. Today, one main strand within the highly visible social movements is the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) movement which, despite not being a mass movement, integrates the question of the recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights into the public discourse. In this article, we investigate the problem of the 'invisibility' of Polish lesbians and bisexual women in social movements and in the public domain. Also, we reflect on incidents which have played a crucial role for the development of the lesbian identity and the emancipation of women in Poland." (author's abstract

(In)visible learners or school as a space for negotiating integration? : challenges of working with migrant children through the lens of teachers

Poland has been becoming a migrant country over the past years, experiencing recently increased visibility of migrant children at schools. At the same time, the issue of their support and integration remains on the margin of educational policy and depends on the activity of local authorities and, above all, of school head-teachers and teachers. Drawing on the qualitative study carried out in 2020 within the project CHILD-UP Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a way of Upgrading Policies of Participation (Horizon 2020) in schools in Kraków and South-East Poland (where one of the centres for foreigners is located), this article comprises a discussion on the extent to which Polish schools are ready to accept migrant (including refugee) children, to enhance their agency and support integration processes. Therefore, it raises a question whether schools are able to effectively support migrant children linguistically as well as help them enter into peer groups in the course of their educational activities

The European HIV/AIDS archive : building a queer counter-memory

Mobilising a queer theoretical framework, by which we mean embracing unhappiness, ephemerality and instability, this chapter reflects on processes of archiving oral histories as part of the European HIV/AIDS Archive (EHAA) by presenting selected challenges and tensions that lie at the heart of remembering, narrating and archiving the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the broader European region. The EHAA, an online collection of oral history interviews and digitized materials, has been developed to further establish HIV/AIDS history as part of the broader social memory so as to work through the trauma of mass death and social discrimination, and to document innovations, tensions and inconsistencies in engaging with the epidemic across the region. Building on a growing interest in archiving histories of HIV activism from across Europe and North America, the EHAA project dates back to efforts by the "AIDS History into Museums Working Group" (AKAIM) to preserve such histories in Germany. The project was further developed and expanded in two research projects: ‘Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health’ (EUROPACH) and ‘Don’t criminalize passion! The AIDS crisis and political mobilization in the 1980s and early 1990s in Germany’. Explicitly deviating from an investment in offspring as route for the transmission of memory, the EHAA joins other queer archival work imagined as sites for handing down queer history. The chapter hence argues that the EHAA contributes to queer memory work as a necessary revision of public remembrance and current perceptions of the epidemic, and, at the same time, as a source of inspiration for future activism

HIV/AIDS and its monsters. Negotiating criminalisation along the monster–human continuum

We use the concept of the ‘monster’ in this article as an analytical tool to grasp a variety of persons who – understood to be criminals in their countries of residence, and living with or thought to be particularly vulnerable to HIV – are perceived as threats from across the European region. Building on the field of monster studies, we focus here on strategies undertaken to shift the ‘monstrous’ towards the ‘human’ along what we describe as monster–human continuums. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork from Germany, Poland and Greece, four case studies examine processes of (re-)humanisation in the fields of migration, prisons, drug use and sex work that emerge at the intersections of humanitarianism, public health, human rights and citizenship. In particular, we propose that these strategies can entail the production of dissimilar forms of political subjectivity, the redistribution of responsibility or vulnerability and a reshuffling of blame within the moral economy of innocence and guilt – strategies that produce particular norms and forms of the human. These strategies, moreover, involve the normalisation or suppression of ‘abnormal’, ‘irrational’ or ‘guilty’ dimensions of criminalised subjects, thereby taming their capacity to confuse or confront societies’ worldviews, and ultimately foreclosing the possibility to imagine a being-in-the-world otherwise. We thus conclude by asking how embracing the monstrous might facilitate the navigation of cultural, social and moral anxieties that leave room for complex and conflicting practices and subjectivities