Although the randomized control trial (RCT) is considered the gold standard for evidence-based research in medicine, its findings of biomedical ‘efficacy’ under isolated test conditions stand apart from what affects the successful implementation and take up of the intervention, that is, ‘effectiveness’ in real world conditions. In this symposium we consider the challenges that emerge […]

Mel Chen in the Citizen Sense “Sensing Practices” seminar series co-hosted with the {???} In this talk I consider a number of intersecting phenomena: the often feminized exceptionality of “brain fog” and other cognitive departures from expected temporalities, overlapping with more temporally durative (or unexcusable by other means) “chronic illness”; the narration of biochemical transactions […]

Since the identification of HIV, the virus has required extensive engagement between the social sciences and biomedicine. However, the relationship between the two has often been contentious: differences in language, frameworks for analysis, representation and understandings of what is at stake have provoked responses to the virus to categorise themselves as either biomedical or behavioural […]

The increasing emphasis on using antiretrovirals for prevention confronts the HIV field with new challenges and new possibilities. Evidence of the efficacy of TasP (treatment as prevention) and PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) from randomised controlled trials has stimulated debate on questions of acceptability, on risk to existing safe sex practices (condom use), the development of drug […]