ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on HIV programmes globally in 2020 and 2021. Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study of HIV outreach to men who have sex with men in Jakarta, Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter shows how policy imperatives requiring quantitative evidence of impact and success undermined the contribution outreach workers made to the provision of care. Care and the intimacy that it required generated both possibility and vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic. This account of HIV outreach work recentres the need for ethnography as a form of critique grounded in long-term relationships. Remaining attentive to the everyday concerns of HIV outreach workers – including how they engage with demands from hegemonic biomedical and behavioural science models – can help critique the origins and even the violence concealed by normative demands for evidence in international health programmes.
