Tecnologias de comunicação e a invenção do cuidado do HIV e da AIDS

Abstract

The HIV and AIDS epidemics grow in the so-called key populations, specially amongst men who have sex with men, despite the variety of biomedical technologies for prevention and care made possible by the scientific progress of the last decade and, in Brazil, accessible for free trough the Unified Health System. From the Public Health field contributions based on the vulnerability paradigm (Calazans; Ayres; Pinheiro, 2018), the preliminar exploratory research concluded that the HIV and AIDS prevention and care politics have not been formulated alongside the practical dimension of the people more vulnerable to these epidemics – with no special attention to the communication technologies and everyday media practices. This research has as object the very notion of HIV and AIDS care and its relation with communication. The main assumption is that the absence of the Communication field (as defined by Sodré, 2014) in the medical thinking and practice is due to epistemological assumptions structured by the positivism tradition (Canguilhem, 2022). From a methodological point of view, this is a qualitative research, based on the Bardin (2020) content analysis proposal. Its main objective is to investigate the HIV and AIDS care problem formulation and how the communication takes place in this process. Many media practices were taken as analysis corpora: thematic essays, government and community-oriented materials, scientific articles, a YouTube video and print screens from Grindr, a geosocial network application for mobile devices. The analysis took in consideration the concept of inventive cognition (Kastrup, 2007), the Bergson metaphysics (2010; 2022) and authors whose works are included in the so-called affective turn in the cognition and communication studies: Regis (2022), Grusin (2010), Ahmed (2004; 2014) and others. The analysis process concludes that, even though scientific articles about HIV and AIDS point to stigma as a main challenge and, more recently, emphasize the role of media practices on the epidemic resurgence, there is a gap of proposals related to their role on care processes, which is due to a disproportional emphasis on strictly biomedical approaches. The research pointed out the increasingly centrality of communication in these processes and the need of further investigation on how medical epistemologies contribute to its negligence.