Assessments of the importance of different routes of HIV-1 (HIV)transmission are vital for prioritization of control efforts. Lack of consistent direct data and large uncertainty in the risk of HIV transmission from HIV-contaminated injections has made quantifying the proportion of transmission caused by contaminated injections in sub-Saharan Africa difficult and unavoidably subjective. Depending on the risk assumed, estimates have ranged from 2.5% to 30% or more. We present a method based on an agestructured transmission model that allows the relative contribution of HIV-contaminated injections, and other routes of HIV transmission, to be robustly estimated, both fully quantifying and substantially reducing the associated uncertainty. To do this, we adopt a Bayesian perspective, and show how prior beliefs regarding the safety of injections and the proportion of HIV incidence due to contaminated injections should, in many cases, be substantially modified in light of age-stratified incidence and injection data, resulting in improved (posterior) estimates. Applying the method to data from rural southwest Uganda, we show that the highest estimates of the proportion of incidence due to injections are reduced from 15.5% (95% credible interval) (0.7%, 44.9%) to 5.2% (0.5%, 17.0%) if random mixing is assumed, and from 14.6% (0.7%, 42.5%) to 11.8% (1.2%, 32.5%) under assortative mixing. Lower, and more widely accepted, estimates remain largely unchanged, between 1% and 3% (0.1-6.3%). Although important uncertainty remains, our analysis shows that in rural Uganda, contaminated injections are unlikely to account for a large proportion of HIV incidence. This result is likely to be generalizable to many other populations in sub-Saharan Africa.

This article examines the conflicting and paradoxical ways in which race and citizenship intersect in late capitalism, and how dancers negotiate these contradictions through their bodily labor. Focusing on South Asian dancers in the UK, I suggest that transnational South Asian dancers have increasingly had to emphasize flexibility and mobility in their bodies and dance practices in order to gain access to mainstream funding, venues, audiences, resources, and touring circuits which have traditionally marginalized non-white dance practices. I argue that “flexible citizenship” is not just a political strategy to negotiate capital; it is also a bodily tactic and an embodied response to the racialization of labor in neoliberal economies. However, there are limits to how far the flexibility of flexible citizenship can stretch. Although the creativity of South Asian dancers and the strength of their bodily practices has helped them to negotiate racial inequalities in Britain, immigration laws, arts funding policies, and employment regulations have immobilized dancers. Addressing the various complexities and contradictions in which transnational bodies are embroiled, this essay is both a tribute to the creative, flexible practices of South Asian dancers as well as an acknowledgment of the limits of flexible citizenship and a critique of neoliberalism's toll on the racialized dancing body.

Flexible Bodies charts the emergence of British South Asian dance as a distinctive dance genre. Analyzing dance works, dance films, rehearsals, workshops, and touring alongside immigration policy, arts funding initiatives, citizenship discourse, and global economic conditions, author Anusha Kedhar traces shifts in British South Asian dance from 1990s Cool Britannia multiculturalism to fractious race relations in the wake of the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks to economic fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis, and, finally, to anti-immigrant rhetoric leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with dancers, in-depth choreographic analysis of major dance works, and the author’s own lived experiences as a professional dancer in London, Flexible Bodies tells the story of British South Asian dancers and the creative ways in which they negotiate the demands of neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices, including agility, versatility, mobility, speed, and risk-taking. Attending to pain, injury, and other restrictions on movement, it also reveals the bodily limits of flexibility. Theorizing flexibility as material and metaphor, the book argues that flexibility is both a tool of labor exploitation and a bodily tactic that British South Asian dancers exploit to navigate volatile economic and political conditions. With its unique focus on the everyday aspects of dancing and dance-making Flexible Bodies honors the lives and labor of dancers and their contributions to a distinct and dynamic sector of British dance.

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Flexible Bodies situates the late twentieth-century emergence of British South Asian dance as a genre in relation to the parallel rise of neoliberalism and multiculturalism in Britain.1 Specifically, it tells the story of British South Asian dancers and the creative ways in which they negotiate the demands of neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices, including agility, versatility, speed, mobility, adaptability, and risk-taking. Attending to pain, injury, and other restrictions on movement, it also reveals the bodily limits of flexibility. Theorizing the flexible aesthetics of British South Asian dancers as both a bodily practice and political tactic, ...