
Dr Chase Ledin is an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow in the Usher Institute. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He is the current editor in chief of The Polyphony - a medical humanities public engagement platform hosted by Durham University's Institute for Medical Humanities. Chase is currently working on a monograph based upon his PhD research, titled Speculative Health: Queering STS and Disease Elimination Futures, and co-editing an academic collection with Simon Lock and Benjamin Weil, titled Queering STS: Theories, Methods, Practices. He has work published or forthcoming in Culture, Health & Sexuality, Sociology of Health & Illness, the Journal of Science Communication, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
As a sociologist and historian of public health, I am interested in how public health innovation and biomedical technologies – including HIV treatment as prevention (ARVs, PrEP and PEP) and STI prevention (doxy PrEP/PEP) – are socially and culturally constructed in society. My PhD research examined social imaginaries of biomedical innovation within public health promotion and queer AIDS media to define and contest the imagined alternative futures with and ‘after AIDS’. This work contributes to ongoing conversations about intervention efficacy, technological determinism, and national and global campaigns to 'end HIV' in the Global North. My postdoctoral research explores participatory methods for improving sexual health outreach and engagement in Scotland.