Barriers to accessing HIV-prevention services, experienced by African and Caribbean communities in Canada, is an issue warranting sustained research. This study seeks to achieve a better understanding of the nature of HIV-prevention services in Canada, and to explore the dynamics, which underpin barriers to accessing these services confronting African and Caribbean populations in Toronto (Canada). This study also endeavours to assess what is being done to reduce these barriers. Semi-structured qualitative interviews with 7 professionals and community workers who were involved in organizing, researching and delivering HIV-prevention services were conducted for this study. Four themes pertaining to barriers to accessing HIV-prevention services, including, levels of cultural competence and sensitivity among service providers; cultural and social stigma directed at persons living with HIV/AIDS; various social determinants of health, including gender, race and precarious immigration status’; as well as constrained funding resources that are available for service providers; were uncovered in the findings of the study. The paper concludes that several health promotion and health education initiatives exist, which can help reduce these barriers to HIV-prevention service access for these populations. However, in order to ensure their effectiveness there will be much needed involvement from community and other relevant government agencies, which will need to work separately and in conjunction with one another, in order to tackle some of the broader issues that affect these populations.

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CAM and TM have generally been limited. However, recent attempt by Joana Almeida at proposing camisation, as a conceptual/theoretical framework for the analysis of CAM in western society is both timely and welcome. 1

The use of alternative medicine (AM) outside mainstream healthcare has witnessed an increasing upsurge across western societies in recent decades. The theoretical tool articulated to capture this growing uptake of AM coalesced around the framework of alternativisation. Drawing from the perspectives in medical sociology, this article maps out the dimensions through which alternativisation and the expansion of AM in society. The key questions of what is alternativisation, how useful is alternativisation as a sociological concept, what is the nexus between alternativisation, medicalisation and pharmaceutisation and what are the future sociological agendas in this new domain are addressed in this article. It is posited that alternativisation occurs in society because AM practitioners contest therapeutic space with orthodox medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies and further extend their sphere of competence and expertise to the production of medicinal products for every day and personal problems that are outside the purview of medicalisation and pharmaceutisation. The article concludes by fleshing out empirical issues that are likely to impact the domain of AM as a form of healthcare and enriches the conceptual value of alternativisation in future sociological research.

Racialisation is a Marxist concept that has been utilised to understand racism patterns and reproduction in Western societies for more than three decades. In Marxist parlance, racialisation is the ideological process through which the state racialised a section of the population (ethnic minorities) for political purposes. The centrality of the state in racialisation discourse has inhibited the class basis that underpins racialisation. This article articulates the class analysis of racialisation, positing that racialisation stems from racism ideology that the Western ruling class utilised to divide the people along the ethnic line as a means of preserving and maintaining ruling class influence and prestige in society and protecting the capitalist system from being challenged by the unity of the people along the class line. Racialisation is utilised to reproduce racism, using media, laws, regulations and institutional practices to entrench division and disunity in society and preserve their control system under capitalism. In discussing the future of racism, this article critiques the current anti-racism campaign/movement founded and rooted in race discourse and race consciousness and argues that a shift from race consciousness to racialised consciousness is pivotal towards deconstruction and eradicating all vestiges of racism in the global society. The article concludes that racialised consciousness would act as a political unifier in anti-racism campaigns and connects the struggles of Black working and middle class with that of the White working and middle class in terms of collaboration and solidarity, to collectively challenge the capitalist system that is responsible for oppression, inequality and racism on class lines.