MULTISPECIES (HI)STORIES IN THE CONTEXT OF HIV PREVENTION: REFLECTIONS ON THE PRACTICAL, ETHICAL AND SYMBIOPOLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF IMAGINING A FUTURE WITH HIV

London Conference in Critical Thought, July 5-6 2019,

Centre for Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London.

If the zero-sum game that previously defined human-HIV relations has now been flipped by recent technological advances in HIV-related medicine, should we and can we relate to HIV in a way that goes beyond a paradigm of elimination? To this end, this paper will explore how an attention to process and temporality can help sensitise us to different articulations of human-technology-microbe so that HIV may be (re)conceptualised in a way that eschews essentialism. If the imagination of a future without HIV fosters a neglect and delegitimization of the myriad of ways in which we may want to or are always already co-creating our lives with in/non/human others in new and surprising ways, then what practical and ethical difference does imagining a future with HIV make? Relatedly, could approaching HIV in terms of interspecies familiarity, rather than alterity, act as a lure through which we might (re)think the aims and organisation of Public Health? Drawing on my research with men who have sex with men (MSM) to tell multispecies stories about human technology-microbe, this paper is a speculative foray into symbiopolitics and an attempt to bring into being a Public Health which might be different, but is not.