Treating the Numbers: HIV/AID Surveillance, Subjectivity, and Risk

Using ethnographic data, I focus on how people living with HIV/AIDS in Miami, Florida come to know and govern themselves through quantification and categories of risk, race, and ethnicity. I explore the various levels of surveillance that structure HIV/AIDS prevention programs and highlight how numerical subjectivities'' circulate, how identity and subjectivity become entangled in numerical considerations, and how particular groups of people come to be identified with certain diseases such as HIV/AIDS. By examining the deployment and interpretation of AIDS statistical data among Haitians in Miami, I illustrate how identities, through categories such as heterosexual'' and high risk groups,'' circulate, gain traction, and become meaningful for public health institutions and the people they seek to manage.