Banca de DEFESA: FERNANDO JOAQUIM DA SILVA JUNIOR

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : FERNANDO JOAQUIM DA SILVA JUNIOR
DATE: 27/06/2025
TIME: 09:00
LOCAL: Sala a definir
TITLE:

(In)gesting a Prevention Policy: An Ethnography of PrEP in the Biomedicalized Response to HIV in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil

KEY WORDS:

Anthropology of Health; HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis; PrEP; Sexualities; Public Policy; Public Health.

PAGES: 297
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Antropologia
SUMMARY:

This anthropological research investigates how the national public policy for HIV prevention, through PrEP, is established within a historical and social context of the biomedicalization of life that began in the 20th century. At the same time, the study focuses on the intimate and everyday relationships that form in the public scene of Natal, the capital of Rio Grande do Norte, in Northeast Brazil. Along this path, the fissures, challenges, and nuances of this policy are exposed, revealing that the complexity of lived experience – composed of diverse agents, both collective and individual, formalized or not – traverses, in various ways, notions of “access,” “adherence,” and “use” of PrEP. The production and analysis of the anthropological data were supported by participant observation in intense friction between my experiences and those of my interlocutors in face-to-face contexts and through technological means of interaction, such as Grindr and WhatsApp. Moreover, the analysis of official documents from the Ministry of Health and of publicly available information provided by managers and health professionals from Natal was indispensable. In the first chapter, I recover and reintegrate PrEP into its broader context based on a historical and social overview of HIV and AIDS in the “era of biomedicalization,” drawing parallels between global and national dynamics and highlighting challenges such as setbacks in financing and the precarization of civil organizations. In the second chapter, I analyze the consolidation of PrEP as a product of “scientific evidence” and an instrument of public policy, through an examination of the Clinical Protocols, the Therapeutic Guidelines, and the clinical trials that underpinned its incorporation by the Federal Government. The third chapter adopts an anthropological perspective to investigate the implementation of the public policy in Natal (RN), showing how political, social, economic, and municipal management dynamics affect the quality of services and the experiences of interlocutors in the search for access to PEP, to PrEP, and to treatment for STIs. Finally, the fourth chapter proposes an integrated analysis of the interfaces between public policies, prevention practices, and experiences of everyday and societal life, presenting the multiple layers of the social world of prevention in Natal and highlighting the internal and social reasons that lead interlocutors both to adopt and to refuse PrEP – from distrust and moral panic to the circulation of misinformation and rumors, elements that may occasion biographical ruptures and transform the ways of “doing prevention”.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1358748 - CARLOS GUILHERME OCTAVIANO DO VALLE
Interno - 1152605 - FRANCISCO CLEITON VIEIRA SILVA DO RÊGO
Interna - 1360691 - RITA DE CASSIA MARIA NEVES
Interna - 1691014 - ROZELI MARIA PORTO
Externo à Instituição - KRIS HERIK DE OLIVEIRA
Externa à Instituição - SIMONE SOUZA MONTEIRO - ENSP