Mark Gaspar
Mark Gaspar is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, with a disciplinary focus in sociology. He completed his MA in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. His main research fields include health and illness studies, risk studies and sexuality studies. Mark has experience as a harm reduction outreach volunteer with the AIDS Committee of Toronto. He has taught HIV/AIDS courses at the university level, has coordinated social science research symposia on HIV/AIDS, and is currently a Universities Without Walls Research Fellow.
Mark is also a research assistant for The Atlantic Interdisciplinary Research Network for Social and Behavioural Issues in Hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS (AIRN). Through AIRN he is collaborating on a media project with Direction 180, an IDU health service provider in Halifax. He is also working on a landscape research study to access the needs of HIV/AIDS organisations in the Atlantic region in preparation for the implementation of new Public Health funding structures.
Knowing HIV: Understanding At-Risk, Gay Men’s Knowledge of the Contemporary Canadian HIV Prevention Sector
This research project asks: what role does HIV/AIDS prevention research and services play in the everyday lives of at-risk, young gay and queer Canadian men? The first part of the project, which draws from a sociology of knowledge perspective, examines what the key prevention messages and debates are within the HIV/AIDS research, service and community sector in the last five years (e.g. treatment as prevention).
Part two then examines how these messages figure in the everyday lives of at-risk subjects who are completely outside of the HIV/AIDS sector. For this analysis, data is drawn from 34 semi-structured interviews with young (18-35), HIV negative and sero-status unknown, gay and queer men living in Montréal and Toronto. The interviews concentrated on how these men perceive themselves to be/or not to be at-risk, how they understand the field of HIV prevention, and what they think about key prevention issues and debates such as sero-status disclosure. These interviews paid particular attention to how these men have learned from experiences of sero-status uncertainty and how these moments have shaped their latter interpretations of prevention and risk. Support from SRC is helping in the transcription of this data set.
The outcomes from this project will be useful to researchers from various sectors of the HIV/AIDS field. It will provide a framework to think through the ways in which different spheres of knowledge production and experience come together to produce variable health outcomes. Data from the interviews will also help us to determine how our current services are meeting or are failing to meet the needs of this population.
