LICENTIA COGITATIONIS

Talking Sex with Noe and Clay There are the three questions we chose for our first Sex Talk on InstaLive or somewhere. We are both health educators, who primarily teach about sexuality.  Each question is frame as academic or accessible; so that nuances and particularities can be discussed alongside universal commons. The goal is to bridge the gap between what people are thinking and discussing among themselves and their peers, and what has been built by scholarship.  ☭ All we want is a cutsie revolution ☭ HIV & Stigma  How can we teach about HIV in a way that breaks down stigma, instead of making it seem more shameful or different than other STIs? Answer:  For me, the distinction itself distracts from the primary points I want people to take away from lesson on HIV. Currently, I talk about HIV in the context of other STIs, because that is the lesson. I typically break them down into 3 categories: vaccine preventable, cureable, and treatable- which is Hepatitis a...

Public health has long been shackled to surveillance, counting, monitoring, and extraction of data from communities who rarely see justice in return. We are told that without surveillance, there can be no health. But what if the opposite is true? A world without epidemiological surveillance would not be ignorant of health; it would be deeply attentive to suffering. But instead of tracking illness to control populations, it would mobilize care to eliminate the conditions that make people sick in the first place. The measure of public health would not be numbers on a dashboard but whether communities live with dignity, security, and joy. “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Anansi      This quote written by my favorite anthropologist, the late David Graeber, in his book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucrac y exemplifies how I think about and move...