“They’re energetic.” “They’re passionate.” “They’re fun.”
Young people are celebrated by contemporary society for a handful of characteristics that, while certainly true, can also be disempowering, banal, and of disservice to their needs. Today, young scholars from Benin and Canada spoke to fellow peers and other participants at the International AIDS Conference about their research, focusing on the fact that many young people are also something else:
They’re smart.
Will Turk, a 19 year-old University of Winnipeg student studying biochemistry, discussed his work on sex workers from Pumwani Kenya. He is an assistant researcher at Canada’s national microbiology laboratory, where he is studying the Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLAG), which assists the body in recognizing self-cells and identifying foreign invaders, such as HIV, allowing the body to reject it’s entry and thereby preventing new infections.
The sex workers he has studied have been involved in high-risk sex trade work for roughly 20 years, however, many have remained negative. He found that those who had not contracted the virus had particular variants of HLAG, while those who were positive had more susceptible variants.
The theory is that by interrupting HLAG in the mucosal tract, through a vaginal applicant similar to a microbicide, the spread of HIV can be prevented, however he qualified that at this point HLAG research is still in its preliminary phases.
Sarah Switzer, a 23-year-old native of Toronto, discussed her research into discourses of self-care and responsibility. She recruited 50 students from her university and had them gather mass media material, which they then critiqued, reflected upon, and used to identify existing gaps in HIV theory. She showed the audience a book of compiled ‘secret messages’ the students had provided her.
“The book can be used as a prevention tool in itself,” she explained, but also serves to identify existing gaps in HIV/AIDS scholarship. She has been involved in the Otesha program, teaching “adbusting” to peers—assisting them in understanding mass media messages in terms of self-identity and behavior, and which runs several social justice and environmentalism campaigns.
Sophie Gbesso, a young woman from Benin, conducted a sexual and reproductive health baseline survey in her home community. Through community meetings, focus groups, and hundreds of individual interviews, she identified issues of transactional sex for young girls, intersecting issues involving poverty and marriage, as well as a need for faster program implementation.
Shocked at the results of her study, Sophie has taken it upon herself to help inform her peers within her community about the virus.
Maulik Baxi, a 23-year-old physician from India who moderated the event, asked the participants about the difficulties in gathering peer-review-friendly quantitative data in any HIV study, an issue to which they all acknowledged presents a common issue in numerous qualitative-based contexts.
When asked about their future plans, the young researchers expressed a strong commitment to furthering their education and engaging in AIDS activism. It’s wonderful to see the holistic involvement of my generation in the response to the epidemic, and projects a hopefully narrowing gap between the scholar and the studied.
