Introduction

This chapter details the background of the book, including the political and personal journeys that informed the research on which it is based. Thereafter it briefly introduces each of the three main countries that are the focus of the book – India, Brazil and South Africa – and outlines the evolution of each country’s journey to access and, later, produce AIDS medicines for HIV-positive citizens. Looking at the evolution of policy and theory on the governance of medical technologies, it summarizes how the multi-sited ethnography underpinning the book is configured to explore and link the political and embodied dimensions of accessing HIV medicine as a life-sustaining technology.