Navigating the time-space context of HIV and AIDS: daily routines and access to care

Geographers have shown that daily activities and social networks are constrained by time-space, but there are also enabling facets or opportunities created by daily routines for accessing material and emotional resources, improving quality of life, and even challenging existing power relations. Time-geography in this paper is taken as a starting point to assess how individuals living with HIV and AIDS navigate the complex and often difficult time space contexts defining their access to services. The concept of time space windows of access is offered as a way to understand the opportunities created by daily routines and social network interaction even in highly marginalized social, economic, and political circumstances. Survey data and in-depth interviews conducted with a diverse group of persons living with HIV and AIDS are used to illustrate this conceptual argument. Results indicate that the time space characteristics of daily routines, such as frequency of activities, variety or heterogeneity in activities, and whether activities are self- or social network-oriented, serve to define the availability of temporal and spatial windows of access to services. In addition, daily routines seem to matter for specific types of services, and have a limited role to play in terms of primary medical services or those associated with basic needs. The implications of these findings for theorizing and for enhancing access to services are provided.