ABSTRACT
The body of research within the social sciences on HIV/AIDS of the past seven or eight years has in fact been an experiment in itself. If there is a concerted attack on a topic, made in an atmosphere of urgency, with the greatest possible openness to different disciplines and new approaches, and an unusual lifting of the dead hand of the conventional in academic research: what is the result? It might easily be no more than a mishmash, with pointless repetition and inexplicable contradiction. In fact, the result has been a remarkably coherent whole. The first lesson about social science research which can be learned is perhaps that this method — a purposive, largely problem-driven, sometimes acrimonious, but often energetically collaborative research attack — can achieve as much, and sometimes more, than the conventional measured advance of scientific knowledge.
