Alexander McClelland’s public-facing and community-engaged research program is focused on the intersection of life, law, and illness. As someone living with HIV, he aims to develop new qualitative knowledge to support the realization of rights to bodily autonomy for people living with HIV. A fundamental orientation of McClelland’s work the principles of Nothing About Us, Without Us, and the Greater and Meaningful Involvement of People with HIV. Bringing together the fields of critical criminology, surveillance studies, feminist social research, science and technology studies, and critical public health, McClelland’s work attends to understanding the impacts of criminalization processes and public health surveillance.

He has published both independently and collaboratively in interdisciplinary and disciplinary-specific journals, including the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, American Journal of Public Health, Critical Public Health, and American Journal of Bioethics. His award winning and critically acclaimed book Criminalized Lives: HIV and Legal Violence, published in 2024 with Rutgers University Press, chronicles the legacy of HIV criminalization in Canada and archiving the social movement response calling for change.

His current research, funded by both the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, titled Mapping Sero Surveillance, has been to map the pathway of blood and information collected from people living with HIV in clinical settings once it enters the public health surveillance system in Ontario, Canada. Through qualitative interviews with clinicians and public health authorities, the project is explicating the information management systems, processes, policies, and procedures that take place to enable surveillance in the background, without people’s knowledge or consent. This includes examining how public health authorities have unfettered access to electronic medical records due to loopholes in privacy legislation. The research is also documenting the experiences of people living with HIV who have had contentious interactions with public health authorities, including those who have been under public health investigation or legal orders.

McClelland is also currently leading a wide-ranging community-based team to collaboratively develop a Community-Based HIV and STBBI Surveillance Observatory, to emphasize the need for a justice-oriented approach to public health surveillance. The proposed observatory aims to bring together affected communities, researchers, and public health practitioners to examine public health surveillance to flip the traditional script, making surveillance practices visible and accountable to those they impact most. The project aims to speak back to top-down surveillance systems, and to articulate a new form of counter public health, articulated from the ground-up. The project team involves diverse collaborative partners, including social service organizations, legal experts, grassroots community groups, and university-based researchers.

McClelland is also a member of the Canadian Coalition to Reform HIV Criminalization and the Global Advisory Panel of the HIV Justice Network

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