Research

Current Research

Ongoing PhD Dissertation

HIV/AIDS is a particularly revealing case to understand how public health is differently constructed in Canada. The ‘exceptionalism’ that once defined the response to HIV as a prioritized public health epidemic has faded, leaving behind a system of surveillance and biomedical interventions increasingly downloaded onto under-resourced community organizations (Hindmarch and Orsini, 2022). Although federal principles establish broad national goals, provincial governments play a key role in interpreting and implementing public health approaches. As a result, the responses to HIV/AIDS and the populations impacted vary significantly across provinces. These patterns highlight that HIV is not only an epidemiological issue, but a political one, influenced by specific perspectives that are considered legitimate in policy making. My research asks: How do different constructions of public health incorporate marginalized perspectives, shape the structural inequalities marginalized populations face, and contribute to the persistence or reduction of health inequities? I explore these questions through a comparison of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan has the highest rate of new HIV diagnoses in Canada and lacks a centralized policy response. In contrast, British Columbia has adopted a coordinated approach emphasizing harm reduction, biomedical prevention, and integrated services, contributing to lower incidence rates. These provincial differences raise important questions about how public health is understood, organized, and enacted.

Master's Research Paper

Reconsidering the Role of Identity-Defined Community Organizations in HIV Prevention

Presented at:
- Canadian Political Science Assocation Conference (Toronto, June 2025)
- Carleton Political Science Graduate Student Conference (Ottawa, April 2025)

Abstract: The community-organization oriented response dominates the HIV-related health landscape in Canada, as it builds from the origins of the HIV epidemic as an individualized, demonized, and othered health epidemic. Though community organizations continue to provide significant cultural competency in the alleviation of stigma regarding access to HIV prevention resources, the concentration of health services as direct-to-community, housed within community organizations, heightens associational stigma, obscures funding directed at HIV prevention, and restricts access for those outside of the identity-defined community organization. My research challenges the existing HIV-related prevention landscape by analyzing literature surrounding the HIV epidemic, followed by a case study of Vancouver, British Columbia’s HIV prevention network. I argue that identity must be separated from the provision of health resources, and that community building initiatives (often targeted at identity characteristics) must be distinct from health services. I propose a network of increased collaboration and knowledge transparency that recognizes and prioritizes community building and culturally competent health services, but organizationally distances them. In positioning this argument, I also build on the tenets of intersectionality to position one’s individual lived experiences and structural determinants of health as deterministic of their HIV risk, rather than associating risk directly to identity. Overall, my argument develops from the exclusionary response to the HIV epidemic and opposes the conflation of HIV risk and identity, instead promoting the role of comprehensive knowledge exchange and community collaboration to build networks of culturally competent and accessible support systems which ultimately empower one’s bodily autonomy regarding their HIV risk.

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