LICENTIA COGITATIONIS

Public Health is the most recent site of structural violence and control. What can we do? We have a responsibility as intellectuals to speak truth and expose lies in media, government, elite institutions, and in our own communities. Noam Chomsky warned us in the 60s of the need to hold systems of power to account and avoid the tendency to align our professional priorities with state power. The political economy of misinformation and managed chaos in the Trump Administration is the new frontier; and we must learn to navigate this terrain if we are to outlast the fusillades of fascist ideology that is upon us. Public Health is the best example for how state power and private interests work together to systematically deconstruct the very principles underlying the structures of care on which our public health and human services delivery system is built. Root and stem, they move with precision to exploit vulnerabilities, create controversies, and disrupt the financial and regulatory systems...

Is HIV Vaccine Research a site of progress, or power?  I sat down with Jarissa Greenard of Vanderbilt University’s HIV Vaccine Program to discuss the implications of cultural humility and communication in the research and development contexts. We discussed how the values of  diversity, equity, and inclusion are   entangled with the success of clinical trial outcomes; and how anthropological theory can be a framework for building equitable research designs.  Check  out the conversation here:  https://lnkd.in/egz4uFfU What what unsaid, was the mountain of thoughts and feelings I have about research on human subjects, the role of power and Capital, the critical question of "access" to knowledge created from the study, and the systems of meaning (science and society) that reduce people to data points, without regard for the subjective experiences of participants.   The link above is my public opinion, but read on for the rest of what I think.   ....

  The War on Sex Sex is an important site of social control, adjudication, and- ultimately -oppression. Many social movement organizations have focused on sexual health and do not generally frame their work in terms of social justice or civil rights. The failed attempts to decriminalize HIV in the Virginia legislature, both within and outside the General Assembly, are both troubling and deserving of critical examination, and yet they are just pieces of a much larger puzzle comprising legal, social, and economic systems that do not readily seem to fit together. Institutional ethnography: Interrelationships among the General Assembly, Virginia Department of Health, and community organizations working to repeal the laws criminalizing HIV in the Commonwealth are each a subject of analysis here… The Problems of Prospective: “Thinking Sex”                 From the beginning, this issue was not seen for ...

As a scholar with specific subject matter expertise in anthropology and public health, and as an individual living with HIV, a first generation college student, and queer man with history of substance abuse whose work and life are deeply intertwined, I have derived a lot of comfort and hope in bearing witness to the power of community coalitions while accompanying community leaders and advocates in mobilizing to take care of one another, to act, and to engage in necessary fights around issues that have long been in existence: universal and meaningful healthcare, abolition, housing rights, equal employment, gender equality, environmental justice, and rights of marginalized communities, displaced populations, migrants and immigrants. I have worked alongside community leaders, activists, and health and social providers in the field of HIV and disease prevention who have long refused to accept the status quo, and have instead, created their own forms of care or reimagined the existing sy...