Grant: Catalyst Grant: HIV/AIDS CBR Program - General Stream

This project seeks to explore the relevance of semiotics to thinking about HIV/AIDS prevention and services. Semiotics is centrally concerned with how meanings are established, coded, and disseminated. By looking at different theories of semiotics, and considering them with regards to current HIV prevention and services in Montréal's Haitian communities, this research will explore how this framework can inform future work in this field. This work is exploratory and in a developmental stage. The idea is to explore what semiotics can bring to the table, and how it might help us rethink future work in HIV/AIDS prevention and services. The project is community-based, working in collaboration with Montréal's Haitian communities. Since 2017, more than 12 000 Haitian migrants have arrived in Montréal from the United States, transforming the nature of the community itself. This project asks how semiotics can help us think differently, given these demographic changes, about how to move forward in the work of HIV/AIDS prevention and service delivery. The project involves innovation with semiotics as a new theory and method in HIV/AIDS, and thinking about how to train community members in this framework. As a catalyst grant, it involves some experimentation, and will include sustained reflection on how this experimental work can help inform the development of a more elaborate research protocol in this area.