How to build the HIVe

Intervention Approach

The HIVe is built in participatory reflexive performances with an emerging network of communities of gay men, other MSM, transgenders and other marginalised communities around the world.

The performances compromise many phases.

In Phase 1 (2010-2012), we conducted the following processs:

1. We sought the help of collaborators from the MSM HIV policy and practice fields to understand their existing community-based interventions, and challenges in working with networked and digital technologies.
   
2. The HIVe organised a seminar at the Global Forum on MSM and HIV’s (MSMGF) Preconference at the 2010 XVIII AIDS Conference in Vienna. The forum focused on sharing experiences on innovative digital interventions with a high representative sample of the target population of researchers, practitioners and activists working with and in communities of gay men, other MSM and transgenders.
3. To initiate the ‘building’ of the HIVe, we began to harvest successful practices, by issuing and disseminatinag a call for papers in collaboration with Digital Culture & Education (DCE), an open-access journal.
4. The HIVe supported collaborators from community-based organisations with online and face-to-face mentoring to write up interventions on using technologies from their local contexts as research papers for publication in DCE.
5. We are publishing these manuscripts in a special themed issue of Digital Culture & Education (DCE) entitled 'Building the HIVe'.
6. We are sharing these results at a symposium at the 2012 XIX AIDS Conference in Washington, DC.
   

Evidence of the HIVe

Methodological Rationale

The HIVe uses an innovative conceptual framework, Reflexive Performativity Theory, based on queer and post-structural perspectives.

When HIV research, education and prevention are conceptualised as productively performed in the dynamic interplay of structure and agency with technology, discourse, gender, and sexuality, reducing HIV is related to the capacity to reflexively reconstruct performativity in real-time socio-political-economic contexts.

These contexts are mediated through networking and digital technologies.

The model of the HIVe based on this theory thus generates the pedagogic, structural, discursive, technological, and performative mechanisms to achieve successful health and human rights outcomes.

Cumulatively, these mechanisms reduce HIV by:

1. disrupting the macro contexts of biomedical HIV research and educational practices;
2. networking stakeholders and community participants;  
3. providing access to valuable performative and communicative safe spaces;
4. shifting power to critical social and political sciences;
5. grounding HIV prevention in the real-time lived experience of communities disproportionately at risk to HIV/AIDS;
6. fighting stigma and discrimination;
7. disseminating outputs; and
8. advocating for policy change globally.