“HIV Has Always Been Personal”: A Conversation on Ethics, Activism, and Solidarity

ABSTRACT: The global experience of living with HIV reflects not only the challenges of navigating stigma, health systems, and social exclusion but also the powerful and impactful leadership of people living with HIV through activism, peer support, advocacy, and knowledge-sharing. Nurses have always been close, supporting and helping build and spread initiatives such as peer education, stigma reduction, and rights-based health care. Our editorial is structured around a recorded conversation among long-time researchers, advocates, and practitioners in the field of HIV, reflecting on the ethical, social, and political dimensions that have shaped their work. Framed by personal narratives and collective memories, our dialogue traces early encounters with activism and care work in HIV, asking, "What first drew us in? What moments made the political personal, and how did that change us?" Together, we revisited defining political and social moments in the field-AIDS activism, community-based care, criminalization, funding shifts, and movements for global access-and reflected on how they continue to shape our practice, research, and relationships today. Our conversation surfaced the affective and ethical commitments that emerge when care and activism are entangled. We asked, "How do we sustain solidarity across difference? How do we resist the slide into apathy or despair in a world marked by ongoing injustice and fragmentation?" Conversation and dialogue are powerful spaces that open and invite multiple voices and perspectives. In writing this piece, we aimed to represent a space that was opened as reflective and considered current ethical and political tensions, reminding us why we began.