ASHM is pleased to support The HIV Elimination Project and their work exploring the social aspects of Australia’s goal to virtually eliminate HIV transmission. The organisation attended ASHM’s annual HIV&AIDS conference in 2025 and documented their observations in the following guest post.
In September, our team undertook an ethnography at ASHM’s Australasian HIV&AIDS Conference in Adelaide. This was the first data collection activity for our ARC Discovery Project, The HIV Elimination Project: Exploring the Social Aspects (The HIV Elimination Project). The project is exploring how discourses of HIV elimination are being experienced, and related biomedical and policy interventions are being operationalized, in Australia. This article has been written to introduce our project, explain a bit about our conference ethnography, and share some early analysis of our observations.
The HIV Elimination Project is investigating the emergence of this policy goal and organising narrative in Australia. Australia is widely considered a global leader in HIV prevention and care and is ‘on track’ to meet the UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets. This situation is the result of strong national and state/territory HIV strategies, access and uptake of new biomedical technologies, and decades of community-led health promotion, research and advocacy. While ending new transmissions is a shared goal of all countries, the language of ‘elimination’ is specific to Australia. The precision of this framing tells us something about how we understand our ability to act on the virus, the powers of biomedical technologies and the subjects brought about by them. As this observation hints, while HIV elimination is an epidemiological target, our project also draws attention to it as a discourse. These discourses shape policy framing, underpin resource allocation, constitute ideas of community, and influence how those affected by HIV conduct and understand themselves. For many in the HIV sector, elimination targets feel like common sense: an effective way of framing our work. But we know very little about how this policy discourse informs everyday practices of prevention, risk assessment, treatment and care amongst those less directly engaged in the formation and attainment of these goals.
Conference ethnography is an emerging method in the sociology of policy. This method recognises conferences as influential places at which social problems are articulated and circulated, and potential solutions are formulated and debated. Conferences are often interdisciplinary, bringing together people from a wide range of sectors and with different skill sets and ways of understanding problems. ASHM’s HIV&AIDS conference brings together scientists, clinicians, policymakers, peer organisations, pharmaceutical and health technology companies, as well as community advocates to form and respond to a wide range of issues and opportunities that relate to HIV. At conferences, these attendees make various calls to action, form networks, and raise new concerns (or raise again ones they’ve long been raising!). Conference ethnography offers a way of analysing how policies and interventions are imagined, and how the lives of those impacted by policy decisions are shaped.
HIV elimination targets are linked to the capacity of biomedical technology to end transmission. While scientific framing of elimination trajectories represent these goals as brought about by linear progress towards certain ends, HIV elimination goals are highly dependent on a range of volatile variables – only some of which can be foreseen. In her Welcome to Country, Karuna and Nargunna woman, Aunty Rosalind Coleman reminded us that the journey towards elimination will not be linear but instead that ‘change is certain and essential’ which required us to ‘be open to all possibilities’. Aunty Colemen’s reflections felt particularly pertinent in the context of growing authoritarianism and recent funding cuts to international aid, which several other speakers invoked throughout the conference as challenges to achieving our goals.
On Wednesday afternoon, our team attended a session which explored the sharp rise in HIV transmissions in Fiji. The outbreak in Fiji highlights the incredible precarity of the HIV response in large parts of the world and how reliant global public health ambitions are on geopolitical stability and cooperation. When asked about the likelihood of achieving the UN 2030 targets, a panel member declared ‘I don’t think we’re going to get to 2030. We’ve been derailed.’ Given the general trends of decreasing HIV infections across Australia over the past decade, elimination targets likely feel appropriate and natural to many in the Australian HIV sector. That may not be the case among those concerned with the alarming uptick in HIV infections in many parts of our region. In the current geopolitical context, HIV elimination emerges not as a foregone conclusion of science, but as a precarious aspiration dependent on political and economic will.
Our time in Adelaide provided an important first data set on how HIV elimination is being enacted and imagined in Australia. One of the features of this project is that we are conducting research within our own professional, personal and political communities. Over the three days of the ASHM conference we moved between roles as ethnographers, audience members, presenters, and stall-holders – reflecting the diversity of our positions within the HIV sector as researchers, community members and policy actors. It is our hope that our understanding of different positionalities within the policy spaces of HIV elimination will encourage and enable the project to be methodologically and empirically rich and reflexive.
We will also be undertaking conference ethnographies at the 2026 International AIDS Society Conference in Rio de Janeiro and the 2026 Australasian HIV&AIDS Conference in Melbourne. As we face rising political threats, shifting regional epidemiology, and persistent inequities in access to treatment and prevention, we hope this project will provide insights and enable discussion about the social, political and spatial aspects to HIV elimination. Early in 2026, we will commence our interviews with professionals across the HIV sector in Australia. Please visit our website to learn more about the project: www.eliminationproject.org.au
