Peter Aggleton

‘Strengths-based’ and ‘resilience-building’ interventions have attracted major attention from health policy makers and service providers, positioned as positive ways of working with young people that foreground self-determination. Yet, there is little critical analysis of what these practices entail: what counts as a ‘strengths-based’ or ‘resilience-building’ practice, and what opportunities and limitations they bring. This paper presents an analysis of the research literature to map what are considered ‘strengths-based’ or ‘resilience-building’ practices, focusing specifically on work with marginalised young people, who are commonly the focus of such practice. We drew on Honneth’s plural theory of justice to focus on how these programmes operate relationally in processes of positive identity-building and resource acquisition. We found three categories of practice: (1) programmes that act at an interpersonal level on individuals through counselling and education; (2) programmes that focus on the professional assistance of caseworkers to mobilise resources for young people; and (3) a distinctly different category, ‘whole of system’ programmes that reconfigure the local conditions shaping young people’s lives. Honneth’s framework helped reveal how interpersonal practices of recognition can affirm young people’s worth and status, but can also reproduce obligations of self-management and responsibility. The more ambitious system-level programmes, though rare, demonstrate the potential when interpersonal recognition is coupled with resource redistribution to alter the material and relational conditions of youth disadvantage. The most promising interventions are those that understand ‘strengths’ as produced through social relations and embed recognition and redistribution into the health and social systems that young people are part of.

Desde a posse de Donald Trump para um segundo mandato como presidente dos EUA em 20 de janeiro de 2025, as medidas anunciadas por sua administração estão levando a uma drástica reestruturação das i...

This Commentary addresses key decisions made and policies approved primarily during the first six months of the second Trump administration in the U.S.A. that affect global health, with an emphasis on their implications for the work of World Health Organization (WHO), the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), among others. We highlight the roots of these decisions and priorities in Project 2025 (a policy guidance plan endorsed by more than 100 right-wing U.S. organizations), and their articulation through a series of Executive Orders implemented in accord with the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The Commentary also addresses the ways in which what might be best be described as a politics of cruelty has informed the U.S. administration's actions, assesses the impact that this is likely to have on the future global health, and suggests some of the reasons why global health proved to be such an easy target for the incoming U.S. administration.

Over the past two decades, there has been increased interest in the experiences of young people who transgress cis-heteronormative gender and sexuality norms in school, mostly in the Global North (...

This book explores the relationship between COVID-19 and AIDS. It considers both how the earlier HIV pandemic informed our engagement with COVID-19, as well as the ways in which COVID-19 has changed how we remember and experience AIDS. Individual sections focus on sexual and intimate relationships, inequalities and injustice, the progressive biomedicalisation of the response (in the absence of a vaccine or effective treatment or cure), and professional, practitioner and community perspectives on the pandemics. The authors come from a wide variety of backgrounds – including public health, nursing, law and legal studies, political studies, and the humanities and social sciences. The book contains contributions by established writers such as Dennis Altman, Shalini Bharat, Tim Dean, Deborah Lupton, Shubhada Maitra, Pauline Oosterhoff and Michael Tan, as well as chapters by Chris Ashford and Gareth Longstaff, Bernard Kelly, Dean Murphy and Kiran Pienaar, and Theodore (ted) Kerr. This thought-provoking and timely volume includes case studies from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, the UK, the USA and Vietnam. It has been written for students and scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, including sociology, healthcare, public health, social work, anthropology, and gender and sexuality studies. The book will also be of interest to the general reader who wants a better understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of modern-day pandemics and the personal and community responses to which they give rise.

Global epidemics, such as HIV as well as COVID-19, provide important windows into the political dimensions of health. They are complex events that involve not only viral transmission but also a wide range of social responses at community, national and international levels. This chapter examines responses to HIV and COVID-19 in comparative perspective, showing how these responses have been shaped by the broader social and historical context; how knowledge (as well as ignorance) about each pandemic has been generated and contested over time; and how negative responses in the form of ‘stigma’, prejudice and discrimination have been deployed (and challenged) in relation to both pandemics. In so doing, it explores how pandemics come to be defined as public health ‘emergencies’. The analysis we develop suggests that responses to both HIV and COVID-19 provide insights into the ways in which multiple forms of power are at play – and highlight the need to place emphasis not only on the social determinants of health, but also on what is best understood as the social and political determinants of death.

This book explores the connections between the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics and how both compel us to reflect on our close relationships with viruses. Although there are differences, both pandemics share similarities in relation to their political, social and cultural features. In this introduction, the editors reflect on the process of conducting research amidst a pandemic, and on the multiple, complex and multidirectional ways in which HIV influences COVID-19 and COVID-19 changes HIV. The book brings diverse disciplinary perspectives into conversation with one another to explore how pandemics profoundly impact practices of intimacy and relationships, how social factors are often neglected in responses to viral times, and finally the value of activism, community engagement and social justice. Overall, the book looks back at the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics to envision more equitable pandemic responses and looks forward using COVID-19 as a departure point to rethink the role of viruses in intimate life, social discourses and activism.