PrEP-ing at the end of HIV/AIDS: an anthropological study of Combination Prevention and PrEP in Argentina

ongoing

PrEP-ing focuses on the implementation of Combination HIV Prevention (CP), the most comprehensive strategy of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in the current global effort to “End AIDS by 2030.” CP targets key populations, whose identification coincides with a higher HIV prevalence. Based on the notion that these groups have not responded to more conventional methods, the preventive use of antiretrovirals is prioritized, making Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) its key component. Following a scale-down in wide-ranging policies and programs (formerly a hallmark of HIV/AIDS governance), this strategy entails a more circumscribed biomedical prevention framework, in which antiretrovirals become the “magic-bullets” that protect communities from HIV and new individuals from getting infected. Against this backdrop, PrEP-ing seeks to re-center subjects and social relations through an ethnographic study of the production of this global HIV/AIDS policy in the specific national setting of Argentina. Drawing on insights from critical medical anthropology and studies on global health governance, the anthropology of policies and science and technology studies (STS), I aim to show how global-local entanglements involving biotechnologies, institutions, policymakers, health professionals, activists and PrEP users, come together in the making of CP. Argentina, a middle-income country situated in the global “South” and considered a model in the Latin American region for its early and sustained response to HIV/AIDS will provide a unique scenario to explore this subject. The main objective of this project is to describe and analyze the production of CP by a variety of actors. Taking the implementation of PrEP as a starting point, I seek to explore the constellation of actors and activities involved in the enactment of such policy: from policymakers situated at national and international levels to local health professionals, activists and users’ situated experiences.