Richard Deang

Richard Karl Deang is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He specializes in medical anthropology, STS, critical data studies, and gender and sexuality studies. His main interest lies in the making and the use of categories of people in global sexual health, with emphasis on "men who have sex with men" (MSM), a global demographic category used in HIV/AIDS research, policy, and intervention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Manila and Bangkok, his dissertation is an ethnography and history of the movements and mutations of the category MSM and the impact of these changes on the lives of the people around the world who use this global health category. His dissertation shows the ways in which science and healthcare come together with gender, sexuality, class, and Southeast Asian-ness through the use of MSM in intervention projects like PrEP (HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis): from epidemiologists' production and use of "big data" in research to the shaping of global health policy to the ethical dispositions of care in the activities of NGO workers.