Thick times–transformation, activism and HIV in Poland

Abstract

In this paper, the author explores the entanglements between time and HIV/AIDS activists’ biographies in Poland. More specifically, the aim is to analyse how people living with HIV, activists, professionals, therapists–all of them engaged in constructing and shaping HIV/AIDS policy worlds–experienced the first years of responding to the epidemic and how they frame these past experiences from the present perspective. By looking at different biographies and trajectories of engagement in the HIV/AIDS field, the author examines how various actors conceptualize and reflect upon the ‘thick times’. The intersection of the first responses to the epidemic with transitional changes taking place in Poland in the early 1990s is crucial for understanding the notion of ‘thick times’, its ambivalences and ways in which activists frame their experience from that period.