Urban Action Networks: HIV/AIDS and Community Organizing in New York City

(Paperback)

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Urban Action Networks is a study of how communities organize in response to threats to their lives and well being. As HIV/AIDS wreaked havoc on the worlds of some of the most marginal and disenfranchised people in New York, they came together to create a shared response, forming a new organizational field within which their various efforts were coordinated. This book traces the interorganizational processes by which the groups negotiated shared meanings, collective strategies, and a complex, shifting set of relations with local and national government. It covers the first decade of AIDS, when the organized community groups actively set the agenda. How the communities of the most affected people organized, reorganized, and redefined the social and political context of HIV/AIDS offers an encouraging glimpse into the way in which marginal communities can convert shared needs into collective action.

Reviews

This is a fascinating study of one of the most important and tragic public health events of our generation. It traces the trajectory of the struggle over the definition of AIDS, the slow institutional response, and the dynamics of "blocked action" and finally "getting action" through the medium of action networks. It is a brilliant combination of detached observation and compassionate understanding - a must read for the activist insiders and a lesson for the rest of us watching a crisis unfold and wondering how to react. -- Wolf Heydebrand, New York University
This is a meticulously written ethnography of the dynamics of the political economy of the New York AIDS organizational field from 1981 to 1999...Urban Action Networks is an important contribution to the study of nonprofits, organizational networks, and health policy. The book is a must read for those doing research on and teaching topics related to the role of nonprofit organizations, social networks and social movements in shaping health policy, research, and service provision in the United States. -- Nielan Barnes * Mobilization *

Author Bio

Howard Lune is associate professor of Sociology at Hunter College, CUNY.