Youth voice and HIV prevention: discursive opportunities, limitations and productive impossibilities

Abstract

This paper draws on engagements with ‘voice’ in youth studies and ‘student voice’ work in order to interrogate the limits and opportunities of the call to ‘youth voice’ in HIV prevention discourses. Building on the limitations and opportunities within the debates of the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of speaking and the construction of the youth subject, the author argues that, unless there is commitment to working within the contradictions and instabilities inherent in these debates, ‘youth voice’ risks becoming a powerful discursive technique whereby the blame for failing to prevent HIV is put onto an essentalised category of ‘youth’ as ‘other,’ allowing ‘us’ (the researcher, international development practitioner, technical advisor, policy maker, donor) to escape blame. The author concludes by returning to the notion of an uncertain dialogue and ways in which ‘youth voice’ can begin to work productively within the discursive spaces of HIV prevention.