Princeton HIV/AIDS Workshop May 5th
A number of us scholarly folk met this past week at a workshop on the “Politics and Policy of HIV/AIDS” at Princeton on May 5th. Presenters included Evan Lieberman and Josh Busby of Princeton, Sue Peterson of the College of William and Mary, Susan Sell of George Washington University, Nathan Paxton of Harvard, and Jessica Rich of Berkeley. David Gartner, Policy Director of the Global AIDS Alliance, a Washington advocacy group also provided comments as a practitioner.
We focused on a number of the challenges for conducting research on the topic, the paucity of good data in particular. We also addressed some of the core questions in the study of HIV/AIDS including:
- why some countries have been more responsive than others in addressing HIV/AIDS in their country (Lieberman and Paxton are working on this question in particular),
- the links between HIV/AIDS and national security (Peterson’s work addresses this question),
- the challenge of HIV/AIDS to contemporary models of global capitalism (Susan Sell’s work on intellectual property rights gets at this)
- the relationship between NGOs, the state and HIV/AIDS (both Rich and Busby get at this)
- why some donors have been more generous than others in responding to the AIDS crisis (Busby’s work focuses on this question).
Papers are temporarily available through the conference website. I’ll try to post more on this in days to come.
Filed under: Conference Ideas/Planning