AIDS, South Africa, and the Politics of Knowledge PDF Download

Author: Jeremy R. Youde
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317183452
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Through an in-depth examination of the interactions between the South African government and the international AIDS control regime, Jeremy Youde examines not only the emergence of an epistemic community but also the development of a counter-epistemic community offering fundamentally different understandings of AIDS and radically different policy prescriptions. In addition, individuals have become influential in the crafting of the South African government's AIDS policies, despite universal condemnation from the international scientific community. This study highlights the relevance and importance of Africa to international affairs. The actions of African states call into question many of our basic assumptions and challenge us to refine our analytical framework. It is ideally suited to scholars interested in African studies, international organizations, global governance and infectious diseases.

Author: Susan L. Levine
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780796923943
Category : Alternative medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
"Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge situates South Africa - including its history of stances and political formations around HIV/AIDS - in the broader context of questions relating to science, medicine, human experimentation, and structural violence, all of which shape the cases in the book. Putting South Africa in the context of other cases of contention and contestation about science and medicine in India, Latin America and China helps us to understand the particular history of the South African case itself. Conceived in response to the urgency of bioethical debates in medical anthropology, this ethnographic collection touches the borders of anthropology, philosophy, and public health"--Publisher's website.

Author: K. Pienaar
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137505002
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The HIV epidemic remains one of the most challenging of modern times, despite the enormous promise of anti-retroviral treatment. This timely book takes a critical look at HIV/AIDS in the context of South Africa, the country with the largest HIV epidemic in the world. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies and a close analysis of a range of textual sources, Politics in the Making of HIV/AIDS in South Africa tracks how the disease has been formed and transformed through political struggles. It illuminates the ways these struggles have also generated new selves for those living with HIV. In conducting this enquiry, the book addresses pressing questions about the politics of public health, the ethics of biological citizenship, and agency and the making of neoliberal subjects. It should appeal to scholars and students with interests in the sociology of health and medicine, the body in society, science and technology studies, and public health.

Author: Ida Susser
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 144435910X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
AIDS, Sex, and Culture is a revealing examination of the impact the AIDS epidemic in Africa has had on women, based on the author's own extensive ethnographic research. based on the author's own story growing up in South Africa looks at the impact of social conservatism in the US on AIDS prevention programs discussion of the experiences of women in areas ranging from Durban in KwaZulu Natal to rural settlements in Namibia and Botswana includes a chapter written by Sibongile Mkhize at the University of KwaZulu Natal who tells the story of her own family’s struggle with AIDS

Author: Nana K. Poku
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 135188400X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Sub-Saharan Africa is a region devastated by HIV/AIDS. The extent of the epidemic is only now becoming clear, as increasing numbers of people with HIV are becoming ill. In the absence of massively expanded prevention, treatment and care efforts, the AIDS death toll on the continent is set to escalate rapidly. Despite progress being achieved in localized settings, the alarming statistics reflect the continuing failure of advanced countries to mount a response that matches the scale and severity of the African HIV/AIDS crisis. Over and above the colossal personal suffering, the dire social and economic consequences for fragile nation-states are already being felt, not only in health but in education, industry, agriculture, transport, human resources and economies in general. Countries already crippled by drought, poverty, debt, forced migration and civil war must now contend with massive deterioration in child survival rates and life expectancy, the erosion of the economic family base, massive and insupportable demands on health and public services, chronic labour shortages and volatile national security. Through a critical and detailed exploration of specific case studies, this invaluable volume brings together an unparalleled array of international contributors to redefine the political and economic contours of this calamitous epidemic. It examines the impact of the shortfalls in the 'Global Fund' allocation, the slow pace of administrative processing of aid and the weaknesses of institutional responses to the crisis from African countries and their partners in the global health community. It is essential reading for all concerned with public health, epidemiology, HIV/AIDS research, globalization, development, Africa and indeed our shared future. Features include: ” Unique assessments of HIV/AIDS and its impact on democracy and governance in African states ” Wide-ranging regional and country studies by the foremost thinkers in their fields ” Multi-disciplinary contributions from areas including: Politics, Sociology, Public Health and Development Studies ” Compelling and convincing evidence, thematic in approach ” Innovative and culturally specific insights for long-term planning, care and support

Author: Susanne Koch
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 1928331408
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
With the rise of the knowledge for development paradigm, expert advice has become a prime instrument of foreign aid. At the same time, it has been object of repeated criticism: the chronic failure of technical assistance a notion under which advice is commonly subsumed has been documented in a host of studies. Nonetheless, international organisations continue to send advisors, promising to increase the effectiveness of expert support if their technocratic recommendations are taken up. This book reveals fundamental problems of expert advice in the context of aid that concern issues of power and legitimacy rather than merely flaws of implementation. Based on empirical evidence from South Africa and Tanzania, the authors show that aid-related advisory processes are inevitably obstructed by colliding interests, political pressures and hierarchical relations that impede knowledge transfer and mutual learning. As a result, recipient governments find themselves caught in a perpetual cycle of dependency, continuously advised by experts who convey the shifting paradigms and agendas of their respective donor governments. For young democracies, the persistent presence of external actors is hazardous: ultimately, it poses a threat to the legitimacy of their governments if their policy-making becomes more responsive to foreign demands than to the preferences and needs of their citizens.

Author: Fraser G. McNeill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139499599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This book offers an original anthropological approach to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, demonstrating why AIDS interventions in the former homeland of Venda have failed - and possibly even been counterproductive. It does so through a series of ethnographic encounters, from kings to condoms, which expose the ways in which biomedical understanding of the virus have been rejected by - and incorporated into - local understandings of health, illness, sex and death. Through the songs of female initiation, AIDS education and wandering minstrels, the book argues that music is central to understanding how AIDS interventions operate. This book elucidates a hidden world of meaning in which people sing about what they cannot talk about, where educators are blamed for spreading the virus, and in which condoms are often thought to cause AIDS. The policy implications are clear: African worldviews must be taken seriously if AIDS interventions in Africa are to become successful.

Author: Claire Laurier Decoteau
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606462X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.” In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.

Author: Evan Lieberman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830451
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Why have governments responded to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in such different ways? During the past quarter century, international agencies and donors have disseminated vast resources and a set of best practice recommendations to policymakers around the globe. Yet the governments of developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean continue to implement widely varying policies. Boundaries of Contagion is the first systematic, comparative analysis of the politics of HIV/AIDS. The book explores the political challenges of responding to a stigmatized condition, and identifies ethnic boundaries--the formal and informal institutions that divide societies--as a central influence on politics and policymaking. Evan Lieberman examines the ways in which risk and social competition get mapped onto well-institutionalized patterns of ethnic politics. Where strong ethnic boundaries fragment societies into groups, the politics of AIDS are more likely to involve blame and shame-avoidance tactics against segments of the population. In turn, government leaders of such countries respond far less aggressively to the epidemic. Lieberman's case studies of Brazil, South Africa, and India--three developing countries that face significant AIDS epidemics--are complemented by statistical analyses of the policy responses of Indian states and over seventy developing countries. The studies conclude that varied patterns of ethnic competition shape how governments respond to this devastating problem. The author considers the implications for governments and donors, and the increasing tendency to identify social problems in ethnic terms.

Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309212073
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
HIV/AIDS is a catastrophe globally but nowhere more so than in sub-Saharan Africa, which in 2008 accounted for 67 percent of cases worldwide and 91 percent of new infections. The Institute of Medicine recommends that the United States and African nations move toward a strategy of shared responsibility such that these nations are empowered to take ownership of their HIV/AIDS problem and work to solve it.