Drug consumption and HIV/AIDS were two of the most important public health issues of the last decades of the 20th century. Generally, their history can be written against the backdrop of a larger shift to "new public health" approaches. Within this framework, engagements at the all-encompassing level of life conditions have become a primary focus of prevention strategies. Via the promotion of responsible citizens, or the incorporation of community groups and patient organizations into policy discussions and decisions, the new paradigm increasingly relied on self-regulation and health-based collectivization. At the same time, non- and para-governmental organizations took over a wide range of tasks and invented new fields of intervention.

Not least as a result of the exclusionary policies of the 1970s and early 1980s, affected persons and drug consumers and their supporters formed into community networks, and they developed care structures and activist initiatives. However, whereas heroin consumers kept being confronted with repressive policies and a lack of public support that resulted in pauperization and social exclusion, the gay and lesbian AIDS movements successfully demanded government action and participation in health policy decision-making and challenged contemporary biomedical research. Some scholars have even argued that AIDS activism was centrally involved in the constitution of public health practices and paradigms that extended well beyond the sphere of the epidemic. In this vein, they tell the story of an ultimately successful normalization of a state of emergency in which "liberal" new public health approaches became prevalent over outdated "repressive" policies.

However, research on the history of AIDS activism in Europe is still scarce. Most existing studies focus on limited groups of gay activists and geographic regions outside of Europe. Other publications have been limited to individual accounts. A similar lack of research can be stated with respect to the history of "junkie" activism. Consequently, we still don't know how exactly social movements have been involved in the constitution of subjects, the shaping of community groups, and social practices in both fields. The question to what extent they contributed to processes of normalization, and may have worked to enable the continued neglect of the most marginal, has only been discussed cursorily. Similarly scarce is our knowledge about their actual influence on the (trans)formation of public health knowledge and policies.

Consequently, there is an imbalance between master narratives on the one hand and historiographical knowledge on the other. In particular, the question how exactly "new" public health policies evolved from the "old" has hardly been tackled. The time after the 1970s has only recently attracted interest by contemporary historiography. Existing overviews emphasize the multi-layered differences between the societies of mid and late 20th century respectively. They argue that, against the background of fundamental transformations of the prevailing modes of production, long-term trends such as "pluralization", "individualization", and "liberalization" have become dominant and new ideas on the quality of life, the body, health, and the role of the state have emerged. These narratives tend to underestimate the complexity and heterogeneity of processes of historical change, and to harmonize the times before and after an alleged "break". This applies to the history of public health in particular. In Germany and Switzerland for instance, the drug policies became even more "prohibitive" since the 1960s when the consumers increasingly found themselves in the spotlight of legal and scientific debates and media coverage. Pluralization and liberalization are largely inappropriate concepts to describe such rearrangements.

Against this backdrop, the conference will explore how public health policies in Europe were transformed since the 1960s by focusing on the complex societal reactions to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and to drug consumption. It will examine how divergent social, political, juridical, and economic conditions bore distinctive consequences for both local and national policies and the emergence of what can be called today a European health policy – not least against the background of the streamlining of the EU and the privileging of "best practices" among policy governing bodies in the last decades. Furthermore, the conference aims at discussing the complex histories of HIV/AIDS and drugs with respect to the current re-fortification of biomedical strategies on a global scale. To this end, the conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars – historians as well as social scientists – working on the history of public health in the fields of HIV/AIDS and drugs and focusing on varied European contexts at the local, national, or transnational levels.

The number of participants is limited. Registration is due by September 30, 2016. Contact: Daniel Zürcher (daniel.zuercher@unibas.ch).

Funding is provided by a SNSF International Exploratory Workshop grant and the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel (FAG). The conference is supported by the Institute for European Global Studies and the Department of History, both at the University of Basel.