Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Preventing the spread of HIV and promoting HIV testing has become paramount to the survival of Africa nations such as Zambia. Communication campaigns to prevent the spread of HIV and to promote testing are abundant, yet not enough Zambians have adopted the promoted behaviors, and as a result, the spread of HIV continues to rise. Researchers must examine how individuals respond to campaign messages within a cultural context to inform the use of such campaigns in promoting health behavior change. This paper examines the extent to which HIV prevention and testing behaviors are predicated on the perceptual gap, which is the difference in the estimated impact of messages on the self versus others. The behavioural hypothesis of the third person perception suggests the perceptual gap is a better predictor of people’s behaviors than their exposure to media messages. In a collectivistic culture, the notion of the third person perception and the behavioural hypothesis take on particular importance. In a study of the impact of HIV/AIDS messages on 344 Zambian college students, I examine first- and third-person perceptions of HIV/AIDS messages, focusing on the differences in the estimated impact of the messages in Public Service Announcements (PSAs) versus those presented within a local serial drama. I also examine the perceptual gap, message exposure and other important health behavior change concepts as predictors of condom use and intentions and HIV testing and intentions, examining sex differences. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The paper describes the consequences of HIV/AIDS in Botswana; the country with the highest HIV prevalence rate in Africa. We show that in addition to frequently experienced trauma due to sickness and death, many households experience rising health expenditures and a sharp deterioration of incomes. High levels of morbidity and mortality among workers result in depressed returns on investment, reduced productivity and increased expenditure on training and replacement of workers. As the health care system finds it increasingly difficult to cope, home-based care provides an inadequate solution since the home infrastructure of many households is inadequate for proper care of seriously ill patients.

The stigma associated with AIDS often isolates fragile households and provides an environment in which abuse of the infected and of orphans can go on undetected. Pupils are frequently absent from school, resulting in disrupted learning and poor classroom performance. As HIV infected teachers become sick from opportunistic infections, they spend less time preparing for their classes. The quality of instruction suffers, resulting in an ill prepared skilled manpower, with adverse consequences for social, economic, and political development as well as for good future governance of the country.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Throughout East Africa the HIV/AIDS pandemic has resulted in shortened life spans, increasing numbers of orphans, fewer people in the age cohort which can support both the older and younger dependent populations, as well as changes in household size and household structure. Workers affected include both males and females, and particularly those who have advanced education or technical training. Rural and urban areas have not shown the same patterns of changes, especially with regard to gender roles. Poverty, minimal health facilities and lack of education have all been blamed for the on-going changes..Government policies hampered initial efforts to confront the epidemic, and so time was lost in responding to the danger of varying amounts in each country, and the pandemic was not confined as rapidly as it might have been. Changes in household composition and in cultural practices are evident. Some can be attributed directly to the increased mortality and morbidity, but at the same time some have grown out of increasing global connectiveness, both in communication and transportation, as modernization with increasing urbanization and industrialization has begun to spread throughout less developed areas. Census and health surveillance data will be used to trace the trajectory of the pandemic in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and the resultant sociological consequences for household and family structure in each of the countries.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: While processes of hybridization are common to all post-colonial societies, I believe that South Africa’s uniquely ambivalent historical-social position within the global capitalist world system where it straddles both first- and third-worldness, and its ambiguous volleying between neo-liberalism and Afrocentrism, produces a uniquely polyvocal discursive field in which myriad discourses compete for ultimate legitimacy and claims on the ‘solution’ of AIDS. This paper analyzes three dominant institutionalized discourses that are foremost players in the contentious symbolic struggle raging in post-apartheid South Africa over the meaning of HIV/AIDS. By exploring the controversial rhetoric and policies of Thabo Mbeki’s denialism, the vociferous and fierce battle fought by AIDS activists for the accessibility and affordability of anti-retrovirals, and the ambiguous position into which the profession and culture of traditional healing have been cornered, this presentation intends to use the case of South Africa to expose the stakes involved for post-colonial nations attempting to secure new national imaginations and identities and therefore control their own conditions of hybridity in a world that is both contesting national borders and succumbing to the rule of neoliberalism and an American Empire.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper, I demonstrate that the expectation that countries with relatively high levels of formal gender equality should have a lower prevalence of HIV does not hold true for sub-Saharan Africa. Using OLS regression, the analysis presented below suggests that gender equality, as measured by the United Nations Development Program’s Gender-related Development Index (GDI), correlates with higher HIV prevalence among adult women in sub-Saharan Africa. I argue that this positive relationship can be understood by integrating macro- and micro-level data, examining how the structural conditions of gender inequalities influence the spread of HIV through individual decision making about sexual activity. Approaching the question in this way, I identify three main factors that explain the concurrent rise in gender equality and HIV prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa: The sexual vulnerability of young women in the,region, the link between increasing gender equality, economic growth, income inequality and the material conditions for high-risk situations, and the relationships between older men and younger women.