Jill Owczarzak

This ethnographic project uses HIV prevention programs in Warsaw to explore democratization and privatization as Poland begins European Union accession. As inherently political public health interventions, these programs can be used to understand the ways in which particular groups make claims of citizenship. This research inquires how claims of vulnerability to HIV can advance or hinder political agendas, and how these claims articulate with governmental policies towards health. The anthropology of citizenship and the state asks how regulation of the physical body is used to make arguments for inclusion in, exclusion from, or reformation of the body politic. The ethnography of post-socialism is used to emphasize the strategies people employ to engage these processes of transition.