Wilhelm-Solomon, M., 2011. Communities of Exposure: HIV/AIDS, Encampment and Biosociality in Northern Uganda. ACMS Lunchtime Seminar Series.

To live with HIV is to be exposed to illness, exclusion, and the gaze of others. In the congested displacement camps of conflict-affected Northern Uganda, where there was little or no privacy, those with HIV/AIDS, who fell ill and received treatment, did so in full view of others. Their bodies became a surface upon which social experiences of conflict, displacement and militarism were read. In the extreme adversity of displacement, physical vulnerability and disease-status became a locus of sociality and social identity; I term these biosocial networks ‘communities of exposure'. I argue here that this biosociality goes beyond identification based on a biological condition and therapeutic management - as conceptualised in existing literature - and involves the experience of HIV as a social condition. The key dimensions of this biosociality included practical support, emotional support or counselling, therapeutic rituals, neighbourliness and kin-like relationships, as well as new gender and sexual relations. These practices were continually exposed to social surveillance and labelling which drew on tropes of conflict, and were internalized or resisted. In Northern Uganda, the social recognition of those with HIV as vulnerable thus had a paradoxical symbolism: HIV positive individuals were viewed as a threat to the social order and associated with the violence of war, while also being viewed as victims bearing the sufferings of the community. This paper is based on several periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Uganda between 2006 and 2009.

Biographical note
Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow working with the Migration, Displacement and Health project at the ACMS. Matthew completed his doctorate in Development Studies at the University of Oxford in 2011. The doctorate was an ethnographic study focused on the sociality and sustainability of HIV/AIDS treatment in internally displaced communities in Northern Uganda. Matthew is presently undertaking research on health, migration and citizenship in inner-city Johannesburg. Matthew was born and grew up in Johannesburg, completed his BA Honours in Political Studies at Wits, is a recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship, and has also worked as a freelance journalist.