Papers by Alexander McClelland
Sexualities, 2020
We offer exploratory reflections on the matter of sexual misconduct affecting sexuality minority ... more We offer exploratory reflections on the matter of sexual misconduct affecting sexuality minority male students by males in positions of authority in the university, based on interviews with eight sexual violence service providers and five men across Canada with lived experience, as well as information gathered through our recruitment work. Data were interpreted using thematic analysis. Our results indicate that there is a need to think through the specificity of sexual misconduct involving men in university settings. Several dynamics operate to perpetuate a willed ambiguity on this issue that allow abuses of power to go unchecked. These include difficulties in having a conversation on this topic, the sexualization of gay male culture, gender dynamics among gay men, ‘queer’ justifications, risks of social isolation, and financial precarity.
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Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics: An International Journal, 2012
We examine ethical issues that emerged during a community-based participatory research (CBPR) stu... more We examine ethical issues that emerged during a community-based participatory research (CBPR) study in Toronto, Canada, exploring sexual health attitudes and practices among lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) young people (ages 17–26) labeled with intellectual disabilities. These ethical concerns included: (1) managing the risk of coercion, (2) consent to participate in the study, (3) issues of confidentiality and disclosure, (4) balancing beneficence with self-determination, and (5) role conflict for researcher-practitioners who participate in CBPR projects. Incorporating critical disability perspectives and a heightened awareness of professional role conflict into CBPR practices has the potential to foster development of more inclusive and accessible sexual health initiatives and research environments.
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Critical Public Health
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Health Policy, 2021
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American Journal of Public Health, 2021
Public health institutions are playing an increasingly central role in everyday life as part of t... more Public health institutions are playing an increasingly central role in everyday life as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., through stay-at-home orders, contact tracing, and the enforcement of disease control measures by law enforcement). In light of this, we consider how COVID-19 disparities and disease control practices intersect with the response to the more longstanding epidemic of HIV infection in Canada and the United States. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print June 10, 2021: e1-e3. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306236).
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The American Journal of Bioethics, 2020
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Critical Public Health, 2020
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Health & Place, 2020
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The Lancet HIV, 2019
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Critical Public Health, 2019
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Journal of Homosexuality, 2012
Young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people labeled with intellectual disabilitie... more Young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people labeled with intellectual disabilities have unique sexual health needs that are not being met. Denial by others of their right to pleasure and the exercise of heightened external control over their sexuality are commonplace. Current research indicates that these youth are at heightened risk for compromised sexual health. This study aimed to explore the ways in which social and environmental conditions influence vulnerability to adverse sexual health outcomes for this population. We used a community-based research approach to conduct qualitative interviews and focus groups with 10 young LGBT people (aged 17-26) labeled with intellectual disabilities. Participants reported multiple limitations on their autonomy that resulted in having sex in places where they did not feel comfortable and were unlikely to practice safer sex. Attempts by authority figures to protect youth through limits on their autonomy may be unintentionally leading to negative sexual health outcomes.
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ruor.uottawa.ca
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European Journal of Risk Regulation, 2019
This article examines the convergence of myriad forms of information on people who come to be tar... more This article examines the convergence of myriad forms of information on people who come to be targets of state and public control due to the perceived risk they present through having been alleged to have not disclosed their HIV-positive status to sex partners. Attending to the material, violent impacts of criminalisation – violence, both legal and extralegal – this article outlines how punishment is enhanced and amplified through the flow of information. Focusing on the material impacts of flows of information about the daily lives of people who face criminalisation moves analysis beyond solely a theoretical object of inquiry and helps to frame an understand that the effects of big data operate not just “within” big data surveillance, but also “beyond” big data surveillance.
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Health Education & Behavior, 2021
Community engagement is considered a cornerstone of health promotion practice. Yet engagement is ... more Community engagement is considered a cornerstone of health promotion practice. Yet engagement is a fuzzy term signifying a range of practices. Health scholarship has focused primarily on individual effects of engagement. To understand the complexities of engagement, organizations must also consider relational, structural, and/or organizational factors that inform stakeholders’ subjective understandings and experiences. Community engagement processes are not neutral; they can reproduce and/or dismantle power structures, often in contradictory or unexpected ways. This article discusses diverse stakeholders’ subjective experiences and understandings of engagement within the HIV sector in Toronto, Canada. In our study, a team of community members, service providers, and academics partnered with three HIV community–based organizations to do this work. We used photovoice, a participatory and action-oriented photography method, to identify, document, and analyze participants’ understanding...
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Current Opinion in HIV and AIDS
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Canadian Journal of Law and Society / Revue Canadienne Droit et Société
In May 2012, a former research assistant contacted the Montréal police about an interview he had ... more In May 2012, a former research assistant contacted the Montréal police about an interview he had conducted with Luka Magnotta for the SSHRC-funded research project Sex Work and Intimacy: Escorts and their Clients four years previously. That call ultimately resulted in the Parent and Bruckert v R and Magnotta case. Now, a decade later, we are positioned to reflect on the collective lessons learned (and lost) from the case. In this paper, we provide a lay of the Canadian confidentiality landscape before teasing out ten lessons from Parent c R. To do so, we draw on personal archives, survey results from sixty researchers, twelve key informant interviews with qualitative sociolegal and criminology researchers, and documentary analysis of university research policies. The lessons, which range from the clichéd, to the practical, to the frustrating, have implications for the individual work of Canadian researchers and for the collective work of academic institutions.
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Canadian Journal of Public Health
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Sexualities, 2020
We offer exploratory reflections on the matter of sexual misconduct affecting sexuality minority ... more We offer exploratory reflections on the matter of sexual misconduct affecting sexuality minority male students by males in positions of authority in the university, based on interviews with eight sexual violence service providers and five men across Canada with lived experience, as well as information gathered through our recruitment work. Data were interpreted using thematic analysis. Our results indicate that there is a need to
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Papers by Alexander McClelland
Cherian 6; Duncan MacLachlan 7; 1 Concordia University; 2 Ontario HIV Treatment Network (OHTN); 3 Queen West Community Health Centre; 4 Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention (Black CAP); 5 Ontario AIDS Network (OAN); 6 Prisoners AIDS Support Action Network (PASAN); 7 AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT);
Background: The participation of diverse HIV-positive people in AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) has been negotiated and fought-for since the early days of the epidemic. Since that time, many factors (including government funding requirements, social service sector norms, and policy and procedure development) have resulted in the formalization ASOs. This study examined how these may have also led to an enabling and/or constraining environment for the realization of the greater involvement of people living with HIV (GIPA).
Methods: The community-based research study examined 3 ASOs in Toronto. In-depth interviews were conducted with 13 current and past staff, including Senior Managers, Board Members, and Executive Directors. A Research Advisory Group guided this project, which was comprised of a majority of PLHIV and included representatives of each organization studied.
Results: As the studied ASOs have changed over time, so have the possibilities of meaningful participation for PLHIV within them. A variety of diverse factors, both internal and external to were identified as leading to organizational formalization, while also facilitating and/or limiting the possibilities of GIPA, including government and private sector funding, political pressure, unionization, organizational turmoil and conflict, voluntary-sector norms, management structures, work-place policies, peer staff positions, and equity statements. Formalized ASOs have produced more bureaucratized ways for PLHIV to engage. As organizations have formalized the ways in which they work, a greater number of boundaries are imposed on employees living with HIV- many of whom originally came to organizations as volunteers or to access support services. For people who access services, we see that their interactions within ASOs have become increasingly structured as organizations have developed formal processes to manage staff and ‘service user’ interactions. While often noted as being difficult to negotiate, the formalized structures of today’s ASOs were also described as providing sustainable staff roles with clear guidelines, expectations and job security for PLHIV.
Conclusion: Understanding what factors have been supportive of PLHIV and GIPA can help us to understand how to better realize the possibilities of participatory objectives. The findings from this study have helped to further elaborate the complex factors related to the involvement and participation of PLHIV within Toronto-based ASOs.
"Background: In their origins, AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) were formed as collectives, committees, and coalitions. They had hands-on working Board of Directors, limited staff and resources, and high levels of volunteer involvement. Today, while resources are still an issue, most ASOs are structured as hierarchies, with Executive Directors, middle management, and policy governance Boards. This study aimed to examine the main factors that have contributed towards organizational change to better understand why ASOs have developed the way they have.
Methods: The community-based research study examined 3 ASOs in Toronto to examine the historical trajectory of change, and factors of formalization. In-depth interviews were conducted with 13 current and past staff, including Senior Managers, Board Members, and Executive Directors. A Research Advisory Group guided this project and included representatives of each organization studied.
Results: ASOs change and grow due to many social and political forces that are negotiated over time. Despite their diversity in size and structure, all the organizations studied followed a similar trajectory of growth and formalization. After initial formation, there was a phase of government-funded infrastructure development, when ASOs incorporated, hired staff, formed Board of Directors, and developed limited policies and procedures. After this time, there were a number of periods of turmoil that arose due to governance tensions, crisises of focus, and political and/or funding issues. Following these periods, organizations often unionized, changed senior management, and focused on internal infrastructure strengthening. This led to increased levels of bureaucracy and greater stability. Over-time, these ASOs have moved from where they originated, when they were dually focused – prevent HIV transmission and support those through end-of-life care – to today doing settlement, anti-oppression, mental health, anti- poverty, addictions, housing and other multi-sectoral work. Today, all of the organizations have undergone a large amount of growth. Programs are bigger and serve a wider range of people, and there is more staff than ever before. Despite this many organizations are concerned about the future of the sector and how they will manage the expanding complexities they face.
Conclusion: Since the work of ASOs now must encompass such a multitude of social issues, this can make it difficult to focus on organizational priorities. This study aims to help to reflect on the past development of ASOs, and develop knowledge to support addressing complex questions on the future of the sector."
1. York University, Faculty of Environmental Studies
2. University of Toronto, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
3. University of Toronto, Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation
Theme: Intervention research, special session on critical theory (name needed)
Plain language summary: This study is of documents that define the participatory principle of greater involvement of people living with HIV and AIDS (GIPA). The aim of the research was to understand what assumptions these defining documents make and how the concepts presented on GIPA are then taken up by people working to respond to HIV around the world. The researchers examine the concepts of empowerment, efficiency, and capacity building which are common in GIPA documents.
Background: The greater involvement of people living with HIV and AIDS (GIPA) is an internationally recognized principle meant to underpin HIV responses. From its inception, GIPA has been promoted by NGOs, ASOs, and advocates as a ‘best practice’. However, there exist few monitoring mechanisms to ensure the meaningful implementation of GIPA. The objective of this paper is to investigate the assumptions that guide the GIPA discourse and contribute to existing neo-liberal critiques of the HIV response.
Methods: The paper uses the techniques of critical discourse analysis and draws on Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ (“the conduct of conducts”) to inform a close reading of select Canadian and international GIPA related documents produced following the signing of the Paris Declaration, 1994. These ‘texts’ include UN, international NGOs, and Canadian produced policies, guidelines, and training manuals. The authors examined the texts through an iterative inductive approach to surface implicit meanings and agendas.
Lessons learned: Two forms of GIPA emerge in our findings: a) GIPA that aims to emancipate people living with HIV, and b) a GIPA that is instrumentally aimed at ensuring the efficiency of the HIV response. These two GIPAs are often conflated and used interchangeably within a single document. What results is a GIPA which claims to empower through ‘capacity building’ while simultaneously promoting the disciplining techniques of active citizenship and self-regulation. As GIPA became recognized by governments and multilateral institutions, the emancipatory goals increasingly became subsumed within corporatist rationalities of efficiency and effectiveness. Situating GIPA within a neo-liberal apparatus illustrates how the ‘will to empower’ may unintentionally become a tool of domination.
Recommendations: Greater theorising GIPA is needed to ensure its original emancipatory aims are not lost through the process of implementation. Moving forward to meaningfully engage people living with HIV in our responses we need to examine the assumptions that underpin participatroy discoruses that can result in stifling dialogue and constraining our ability to work to challenge the inequities fuelling the epidemic.
Alexander McClelland 2 Adrian Guta1 Nicole Greenspan3
1. University of Toronto, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Toronto, ON; 2. York University, Faculty of Environmental Studies, Toronto, ON; 3. University of Toronto, Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation , Toronto, ON
Background: The greater involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS (GIPA) is an internationally recognized principle meant to underpin HIV responses. From its inception, GIPA has been promoted by NGOs, ASOs, and advocates as a 'best practice'. However, there exist few monitoring mechanisms to ensure the meaningful implementation of GIPA. With a few notable exceptions, there has been little scholarship in this area. GIPA remains under-theorised, and in need of a critical appraisal. The objective of this paper is to investigate the assumptions that guide the GIPA discourse and contribute to existing neo-liberal critiques of the HIV response.
Methods: The paper uses the techniques of critical discourse analysis and draws on Foucauldian 'governmentality' ("the conduct of conducts") to inform a close reading of select Canadian and international GIPA related documents produced following the signing of the Paris Declaration, 1994. These 'texts' include UN, international NGOs, and Canadian produced policies, guidelines, and training manuals. The authors examined the texts through an iterative inductive approach to surface implicit meanings and agendas.
Results: Two forms of GIPA emerge in our findings: a) GIPA that aims to emancipate people living with HIV, and b) a GIPA that is instrumentally aimed at ensuring the efficiency of the HIV response. These two GIPAs are often conflated and used interchangeably within a single document. What results is a GIPA which claims to empower through 'capacity building' while simultaneously promoting the disciplining techniques of active citizenship and self-regulation.
Conclusions: As GIPA became recognized by governments and multilateral institutions, the emancipatory goals increasingly became subsumed within corporatist rationalities of efficiency and effectiveness. Situating GIPA within a neo-liberal apparatus illustrates how the 'will to empower' may unintentionally become a tool of domination. Greater theorising GIPA is needed to ensure its original emancipatory aims are not lost through the process of implementation."
Edited by Steven Kohm, Kevin Walby, Kelly Gorkoff, Katharina Maier and
Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land The University of Winnipeg Centre for
Interdisciplinary Justice Studies (CIJS) ISSN 1925-2420