Introduction to special issue on international geographies of HIV/AIDS

Abstract

Since the ‘‘discovery’’ or ‘‘naming’’ of HIV slightly over 25 decades ago, researchers, policymakers, activists, and individuals living with the virus have had to redefine their understandings about who is infected, how they are infected, why they are infected, and most importantly for this special issue of GeoJournal, where they are infected. This volume comes at a time when HIV has transitioned from an acute, fastkilling virus into a chronic condition that can be managed, when an individual or community has access to appropriate medications. Geography has always been central to the scientific discoveries and stereotypes that were created surrounding this global pandemic. For example, in one of the most egregious instances of geographic misunderstanding surrounding HIV/AIDS, Haitians were labeled as one of the four ‘‘risk groups’’ in the early 1980s (Shannon et al. 1991; Gould 1993). Even as biomedical and social science researchers expanded their knowledge about vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in the 1990s by looking not at risk groups but rather risky behaviors, geography has been central to this focus (Pope et al. 2009). For example, risky behaviors (such as injection drug use, sex work, anal sex) have been defined in large extent to where they take place, such as shooting galleries (Baer et al. 2003), along truck routes (Klitsch 1992; Koller et al. 2004), in bath houses (Binson et al. 2001), or even in ‘‘prostitute communities’’ (Renaud 1997), or in impoverished areas (Fenton 2004). More recent research into HIV/AIDS has integrated social ecology approaches, which geographers are in an excellent position to use. Social ecology approaches to HIV/AIDS risk and transmission are based on the notions that the social and cultural traits of a certain area lead to risk. In a transition from a disease ecology approach, which medical geographers have traditionally used to approach infectious diseases (Garrett 1995; Meade and Earickson 2000) the social ecology framework gives more emphasis to the social environment in which risk takes place, rather than the physical variables of much infectious disease. This approach lends itself to looking at structural issues that lead to risk, and the authors in this volume often allude to the idea of ‘‘structural violence’’ (Farmer 2003) that leads to a lack of agency to make choices that may decrease individuals’ risk for HIV or other sexually transmitted infections (Kalipeni et al. 2004, 2009). The articles in this special issue were chosen because of the symbiotic effect of their geographic inquiries. For example, in all of these cases, these articles tease out how HIV/AIDS is important in C. K. Pope (&) Central Connecticut State University, 1615 Stanley St., New Britain, CT 06050, USA e-mail: popec@ccsu.edu