(Un)imagined Participants: Theorizing the Accidental Other Within and Beyond Critical HIV/AIDS Research


Jade Da Costa, University of Guelph

This presentation draws on findings from my doctoral research, From Racial Hauntings to Wondrous Echoes: Towards a Collective Memory of HIV/AIDS Resistance , to explore the methodological limitations of theorizing the Accidental Other: participants who are of Other, outsider status to the researcher, and do not match the imagined population of the study. For my research, I interviewed younger racialized and Indigenous activists (aged 18–35) who did work either in or related to HIV/AIDS advocacy about what they knew about local histories of HIV/AIDS resistance. Who I considered to be an activist was inadvertently informed by the same activist currents that shaped my work: Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) movements within and around Tkaronto that mobilize abolitionist, intersectional, decolonial, and grassroots politics. Of the 60 participants whom I interviewed, 35 of them matched this unspoken criterion, whereas the remaining 25 embodied a double Otherness that I had neither expected nor planned for. In addition to exclusively identifying as Black, cishet, and HIV-positive (all categories that I identify as either Outsider or Other too), many of these individuals claimed to not believe in racism and invoked biomedical and neoliberal conceptions of HIV that critical HIV/AIDS research and activism rebukes. This chasm within my sample forced me not only to reckon with the bias that I had unknowingly built into my study, but with the ethics of potentially theorizing the narratives of these Accidental Others: participants whose realities I neither related to nor had accounted for. Drawing on the insights that I learned from this experience, I argue that there are clear-cut moments in which sociologists should not theorize their participants’ experiences; but rather, act as platforms for their narratives.

This paper will be presented at the following session: