● Creative Sick States ● professionalization, transnational relations, STIs, biopharmaceuticals and the pharmaceutical industry, funding, research, prevention, testing policies, palliative care, and art. Many of these issues, presented via excerpts from archived oral histories, art works and artefacts, were put on display in EUROPACH’s concluding exhibition, HIVstories: Living Politics, which toured several European cities over the course of 2020 (europach.phils.uj.edu.pl/project-outcomes/exhibition/). UNPACK I N G TH E AR CH I VE
To illustrate the complexity of the archive, we unpack below three dimensions of its collection that lend it a broader framework than those of many existing projects documenting the unfolding history of the epidemic. These dimensions include: HIV/AIDS Policy Worlds, Ambiguities in the Dominant and the Mar ginal, and the Geopolitics of the Archive.
AGATA DZIUBAN TODD SEKULER JUSTYNA STRUZIK
EUROP E A N HIV/AI D S P OL I CY WOR L D S
The European HIV/AIDS Archive documents the dynamic and complex character of several HIV policy worlds that have emerged in Europe over time. Rather than conceptualizing policies as static and imposed ‘top-down’ by politicians and governing bodies, we draw on the work of Cris Shore and Susan Wright, who grasp policies as lived realities that are co-constructed, negotiated, and acted upon by a multiplicity of actors.1 Accounting for policy worlds means approaching policies as contested instruments of governance that bring about different—and often unexpected—practices, relations, collective identities and forms of subjectivity. It also involves questioning the realization and enactment of policies in the everyday practices of actors such as people living with HIV and AIDS, representatives from communities affected by the virus, advocates and activists, politicians and policy-makers, health care workers, employees of aid organizations, and artists. The oral history interview method is uniquely equipped to capture how various HIV policy worlds are made, negotiated, and lived. This research and archiving strategy, emerging from critical race, queer, and feminist activism 1
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See, e.g., Cris Shore, Susan Wright, ‘Conceptualising Policy: Technologies of Governance and the Politics of Visibility’ in Cris Shore, Susan Wright, and Davide Però eds, Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power (New York, 2011), p 1–26
