uOttawa associate professor Jennifer Kilty named Fulbright scholar

Posted on Friday, September 16, 2016

Jennifer M. Kilty

Congratulations to associate professor Jennifer Kilty, Department of Criminology, on receiving a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar Award as Visiting Research Chair in Canadian Studies at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, US.

She will research the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure and comparisons between Canada and the US. This is another great example of University of Ottawa and U.S. partnerships.

When HIV is a Crime: Law, Ethics and Emotions in a Comparative Context

Jennifer M. Kilty

The criminalization of HIV nondisclosure is still a new area of inquiry and there is virtually no research that explores how frontline AIDS Service Organization (ASO) workers interpret and translate medical and legal information to service users; moreover, there are no international comparisons between Canada and the US, despite the countries’ mutually aggressive prosecution records. The proposed research adds an important American comparative component to build on a nationally funded project already underway in Canada that will benefit how scholars from both nations understand the ‘on the ground’ mechanics of bioethical decision-making related to HIV (non)disclosure. Designing an international research project will foster mutual understanding between the two nations and how their public health and penal cultures attempt to govern health through punitive social control practices that aim to deter nondisclosure. By conceptualizing the ‘punitive turn’ in criminal law as structured by emotions and feeling rules, I aim to offer an original reading of how criminalizing nondisclosure is transforming the bioethical field of frontline HIV advocacy as well as the emotion work performed by ASO staff.

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