Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness
January 29, 2018, 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 3007
1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
Please join us for a talk with Trevor Hoppe on his book, Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness. The book examines how and why US policymakers and public health systems have adopted coercive and punitive responses to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. It also looks at how others diseases have been punished throughout history, and cautions against the extension of criminalization to diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis.
Trevor Hoppe is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Criminology, Law andSocietyDepartment at the University of California at Irvine. Hoppe’s research examines how punishment came to be a legitimate response to controlling HIV and disease more generally. In 2017, Hoppe published The War on Sex, a collection of essays co-edited with David Halperin analyzing the criminalization of sex, and Punishing Disease a monograph explaining the rise of punitive responses to HIV and other infectious diseases.
This talk is part of the Human Rights Program’s year-long speaker series examining the criminalization of human rights concerning gender, sexuality, and reproduction. It is co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, the Criminal Justice Policy Program, and the Center for Health Law Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School.
