Bodies of knowledge: The contested construction of technologies and information of the HIV/AIDS epidemics in Calcutta and New York City

My dissertation considers how knowledge about HIV/AIDS is produced and received, with respect to the effects that information has on individual bodies and on whole communities, or populations that end up organizing as communities. I have produced a comparative social history of community based organizing around HIV/AIDS knowledge in New York in the mid-to-late 90's as compared to similar organizing in Calcutta in the late 90's to 2002. Specifically, I report and compare how immigrants (many of them queer or workers in the sex industry) did such organizing in New York and sex workers (many of them immigrants or queer) did in Calcutta. Critical to my study is the matter of how we commonly come to see risky behaviors as conflated with dangerous people. This question becomes all the more interesting as more money is channeled into international work on AIDS prevention and treatment (by organizations such as the World Bank, major non-profit sources like the Global Fund for AIDS, and by private funders like the Bill and Melissa Gates foundation). Over the past two decades, social movements to contest the stigma and social control that have many times accompanied these public health campaigns have also increased in vigor and in visibility. So how has the social construction of knowledge about HIV/AIDS served: (1) in many cases, as a vehicle for social control targeted at the bodies that serve---symbolically and/or materially---as 'dangerous' vectors for disease; and also (2) as a vehicle for certain politically disenfranchised groups to galvanize themselves into effective movements claiming access to information, to health-care, and to representation?...