Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
Location
"Risk, Feminism, and AIDS"
Speaker:
Aziza Ahmed, Associate Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Contact:
Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Abstract:
The response to the AIDS epidemic, largely one of fear and insecurity, exemplifies how the idea of risk, and the techniques and practices associated with managing risk, play an important role in organizing political, legal, and social responses to crises. This paper critically explores one piece of this larger history: how feminist ideas of risk were deployed inside of epidemiology, law, and policy in the context of HIV/AIDS. Between 1991 and 2013 the number of women living with HIV increased rapidly. Because of the rise in infections amongst women, HIV came to be described as a “feminized” epidemic, dramatically different from the association between gay men and AIDS that structured the early response. The rapid rise of infections amongst women meant that an issue that was once neglected by the women’s rights movement became a key site for feminist intervention. A lack of a clear causal explanation in the epidemiological literature for women’s rapidly increasing vulnerability to HIV created a space for feminist explanations of risk and vulnerability to flourish. This paper explores the gains, limitations, and consequences of this feminist strategy.
Bio:
Aziza Ahmed is Associate Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law. Her scholarship examines the role of science and activism in shaping global and national legal regimes with a particular focus on criminal laws that impact health. Prior to joining Northeastern Professor Ahmed was a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health Program on International Health and Human Rights. She came to that position after a Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship with the International Community of Women Living with HIV. She has also served as an expert member of the Technical Advisory Group for the Global Commission on HIV and the Law convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).