Building the HIVe: Increasing social and political science representation in the HIV field by MSM and TG communities deploying digital technologies

This special themed issue of Digital Culture & Education (DCE) will showcase the diverse ways that men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender (TG) communities deploy networked and mobile technologies to intervene in HIV public health and education practices in ways to confront stigma, realise health, sexual and human rights, and improve HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, care and support. This call for papers targets participants from the Global Forum on MSM and HIV’s (MSMGF) pre-conference entitled, “Be Heard” and the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna, but also invites contributions from activists, artists, researchers, and service-providers not attending. The ambition is to share and learn from effective practices in using digital technologies to scale up Universal Access to HIV-related prevention, care, treatment, and support for sexual minority communities worldwide.

Editors: Gurmit Singh, University of Leeds; Christopher S. Walsh, The Open University; George Ayala, The Global Forum on MSM and HIV

Despite the change in behaviours and sexual practices due to networked and mobile technologies, there remains a lack of willingness to rethink current paradigms for HIV interventions aimed at changing individual behaviours. Effective prevention programmes must now respond to digitally-based and -driven sexual-social behaviours in a global network society geared towards maximising sexual pleasure. The ubiquity of networked, mobile technologies, and the proliferation of social networking tools, combined with the realisation that HIV is a profoundly social disease, challenges current disciplinary biomedical approaches to HIV. Yet, there is a lack of necessary investment in social and political science research on the public health added value of deploying the Internet and mobile technologies by MSM and TG communities for HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, care and support.

This special themed issue presents dynamic interventions that draw on the capabilities of networked and mobile technologies, to build the ‘HIVe.’ The HIVe is an open, non-hierarchical, fluid ecology of HIV activists, practitioners, researchers, and scholars, that actively advocate, disseminate, and promote localised and successful intervention-based practices and challenges. The HIVe exploits the Internet and mobile technologies to advance the impact of the social and political sciences for Universal Access in MSM and TG communities. This special themed issue of Digital Culture & Education (DCE) begins a journey to build the HIVe by developing, exploring, and substantiating the creative and effective merging of HIV and ‘e’ around sexual-social practices and networks, which can shape and influence the future of interdisciplinary and interconnected public health, human rights and education programmes and policies.

Submissions from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community-based organizations that deploy networked and/or mobile technologies in their programmes and interventions are particularly relevant. These manuscripts could be case studies, impact evaluations, or community-based applied research narratives, that illuminate potential openings for advocacy and for policy change in approaches to community-based HIV interventions. Submissions can include “traditional” print texts on empirical research, as well as non-traditional approaches and formats (e.g. descriptions of artefacts, digital storytelling, audio-visual art, etc.).

Potential research and practice questions are:

• What are the characteristics of community-driven social and political science approaches in concentrated epidemics that add value to the effectiveness of public health interventions using networked and mobile technologies for HIV prevention, treatment, care and support?
• What strategic and theoretical insights from these emerging community-based social and political science approaches can be woven together to conceptualize and build the HIVe – a systems-based model for HIV prevention, treatment, care and support, that draws together community development, public health, digital culture and education, and technology?

DCE is committed to building research literacy in social and political science approaches and encourages submissions from developing country authors, from non-scientific and non-native English speaking backgrounds. The journal will offer targeted online mentoring to authors who submit papers of high potential for consideration.

Interested authors should send their manuscripts to the editor of Digital Culture & Education at editor@digitalcultureandeducation.com by October 1, 2010.

Building the HIVe: Increasing social and political science representation in the HIV field by MSM and TG communities deploying digital technologies will be published in January 2011.

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