I have a new paper published, online at least, which is always nice –Locating the global governance of HIV and AIDS: exploring the geographies of transnational advocacy networks. It’s in Health and Place, as part of a forthcoming set of papers on global-local relationships in responses to HIV and AIDS. The paper is co-authored with Colin Marx and Abbey Halcli, and is the result of a long process of research (a bit of qualitative, and some numbers), grant writing (shortlisted once, unfunded alpha second-time round), paper drafting, chatting, re-writing, and so on. So, as well as being fun and challenging to work with Abbey and Colin, it also feels like we’ve now got some reward for our efforts.

When we started on this project, I didn’t have children.

The argument of the paper is that cities are important locations for types of politics that aren’t necessarily best thought of as ‘urban politics’, which may or may not be an interesting thing to say. That might depend on who you are saying it to. Here is the abstract:

Over the last two decades, HIV and AIDS have been framed as a “global problem”. In the process, transnational advocacy networks have emerged as important actors, and particular places are recognised as key nodes in global HIV and AIDS governance. Using the example of London, UK, this paper examines how these networks are involved in local articulations of global governance and reveals that ‘global’ processes are inflected by the locations through which networks are routed. The example suggests the need for further analysis of the geographies through which HIV and AIDS is reconfiguring power relations at a variety of spatial scales.