On Monday, October 18, from 12-1:30 PM, Dr. Amaya Perez-Brumer, Assistant Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, presented a talk titled, “Ethnography of data politics: Rethinking risk, value, and justice in HIV prevention science”.
Abstract: This presentation describes the deployment of ethnographic methods to interrogate the data infrastructures underpinning queer risk epidemiology in Peru, the leading clinical trial site globally to test PrEP among people categorized as MSM and transgender women. Therapeutic technologies (i.e., pre-exposure prophylaxis [PrEP]) alongside personalized diagnostic innovations (i.e., self-testing) have accelerated HIV prevention science and shifted epidemiologic focus from individuals “at-risk” for HIV to those “most at-risk.” The emphasis on enumerative evidence on those “most at-risk” in this context has deeply implicated people categorized as men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women, making epidemiologic risk data derived from queer bodies central to HIV prevention science globally. Drawing on 24 months fieldwork, this “ethnography of data politics” traces how queer risk data is created, contested, and mobilized. Findings advance understandings of how the construction and circulation of data indexes an uncomfortable entanglement between people, health, and capitalism at the center of HIV prevention science.
View the recording for the talk here.
