Messy Free-For-All Or An “Aha!” Moment?: Reflections On An Hiv Awareness Program With African Newcomer Youth

Abstract

This paper traces a collaboration between a White settler anthropologist and Black community liaison and researcher in the design and implementation of HIV awareness strategies. Based on ethnographic research with young people from African newcomer communities who settled in Winnipeg, Canada, their sense that HIV did not exist in Canada was the impetus for our movement of knowledge-to-action. Rather than deliver the facts to them as a passive audience, we created space and time for a series of youth-led conversations that were effective, emotional, corporeal, and socially dynamic. From our respective positionalities, we reflect on the impact of the awareness activity. What at times felt like “a free-for-all” fostered an awareness by the young people, as active agents, of the complexities of HIV as “more than a virus,” especially its racialized underpinnings.