Hasan Tankut Atuk

HASAN TANKUT ATUK, then a graduate student at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minnesota, was awarded funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Paradoxes of Care: Abandonment, Patient Activism, and Regimes of HIV Care in Turkey,” supervised by Dr. Susan Craddock. Funding supported a year-long ethnographic research between September 2021 and August 2022. During this period, the grantee was able to collect data for their dissertation, Pathologies of Care: Public Health, Patient Activism, and HIV Care in Turkey. Over the course of twelve-months, 45 in-depth interviews with health providers, pharmaceutical industry employees, nongovernmental staff members, civil servants, and HIV activists were conducted. Based on the findings, the dissertation demonstrates that HIV care becomes pathological in Turkey by facilitating a joint epidemic of HIV and HIVfobi, status- based stigma and discrimination. Infectious technologies of HIV care create zones of viral abandonment where particularly gay and trans communities are left vulnerable to HIV transmission and socio-medical discrimination.