Yutian Chen, a first-year PhD student in social work at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a one-year grant to study the experiences of young adults living with HIV in China.
Chen was awarded funding from Gilead Sciences in China through its corporate grants program. The grant will support a participatory action research project examining the lived experiences of young adults living with HIV in China, with the goal of enhancing their social support and well-being.
Chen is conducting the project in partnership with Rainbow Nest, an LGBTQ+ community organization in Hangzhou, China. The initiative will use Photovoice, a qualitative research method that allows participants to document their own realities through photography, personal narratives and group discussions. The work is expected to culminate in a podcast series, photography exhibitions, and life-story interviews shaped directly by participants.
Chen said the project is designed to give young people greater control over how their experiences are represented, countering a tendency in past research to treat participants as “others” or data sources rather than collaborators. Allowing participants to frame their own stories reduces the risk of misinterpretation, he said.
“For young adults living with HIV/AIDS, challenges often extend beyond health to include social prejudice and structural inequality,” Chen said. “This project aims to demonstrate that personal stories have value and that individual perspectives can drive broader policy improvement. It also seeks to foster critical dialogue that leads to action and advocacy to help mitigate structural stigma.”
Chen is a graduate research assistant in the Brown School’s Sexuality, Health, and Gender (SHAG) Center. His research uses an intersectional framework to quantitatively and qualitatively examine how interlocking systems of oppression impact adolescents and young people with intersecting marginalized statuses, such as queer, transgender, nonbinary, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. His work also focuses on the strengths and forms of resistance among queer, trans and nonbinary people of color.