Few diseases have provoked as many wild moralistic leaps or stringent attempts to measure, classify, and define risk and treatment standards as AIDS. In Politics in the Corridor of Dying, Jennifer Chan documents the emergence of a diverse range of community-based, nongovernmental, and civil society groups engaged in patient-focused AIDS advocacy worldwide. She also critically evaluates the evolving role of these groups in challenging authoritative global health governance schemes put in place by what she describes as overcontrolling or sanctimonious governments, scientists, religious figures, journalists, educators, and corporations. Drawing on more than 100 interviews conducted across eighteen countries, the book covers a broad spectrum of contemporary sociopolitical issues in AIDS activism, including the criminalization of HIV transmission, the fight against "big pharma," and the politics of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Chan argues that AIDS activism disrupts four contemporary regimes of power-scientific monopoly, market fundamentalism, governance statism, and community control-by elevating alternative knowledge production and human rights. This multidisciplinary book is aimed at students and scholars of public health, sociology, and political science, as well as health practitioners and activists. Politics in the Corridor of Dying makes specific policy recommendations for the future while revealing how AIDS activism around the world has achieved much more than increased funding, better treatment, and more open clinical trial access: by forcing controlling entities to democratize, activists have changed the balance of power for the better and helped advance permanent social change.

A deeply impressive work, one that will surely make an important contribution to the study of global AIDS activism, as well as to our understanding of the political dimensions of the HIV epidemic and of global health more broadly. Politics in the Corridor of Dying provides a deep analysis of some of the most important political processes that have shaped the social response to AIDS around the world; it does an excellent job of laying out a succinct argument and backing it up with documentary evidence. I simply don't know of anything that is as up-to-date or that has as broad a global scope. -- Richard G. Parker, Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health An extraordinary compilation of evidence for the AIDS activist movement and how it has changed the rules not only in the power houses of science and pharmaceuticals but throughout the world in governance bodies and local communities to force authorities to recognize that AIDS care and prevention are human rights issues. -- Mary Guinan, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

About the Author
Jennifer Chan is an associate professor in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. She is the editor of Another Japan Is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship Education and the author of Gender and Human Rights Politics in Japan: Global Norms and Domestic Networks.


Book Information
ISBN 9781421415970
Author Jennifer Chan
Format Paperback
Page Count 344
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 23mm