Although adopting global norms often improves domestic systems of governance, domestic obstacles to norm diffusion are frequent. States that decide to reinvent their political authority simultaneously evaluate which current global norms are desirable and to what extent. In this study, Vlad Kravtsov argues that recent debates about the nature of authority in Putin's Russia and Mbeki's South Africa have resulted in a set of unique ideas on the cardinal goals of the state. This is the first book to explore how these consensual ideas have shaped health governance and impinged on norm diffusion processes. Detailed comparisons of HIV/AIDS governance systems in Russia and South Africa illustrate the argument. The Kremlin's dislike of international recommendations stemmed from the rapidly maturing statism and great power syndrome. Pretoria's responses to global AIDS norms were consistent with the ideas of the African Renaissance, which highlighted indigenousness, market-based empowerment, and moral leadership in global affairs. This book explains how and why the governments under investigation framed the nature of the epidemic, provided evidence-based prevention services, increased universal access to proven lifesaving medicines, and interacted with other participants in social practice.

We see it all the time: organizations strive to persuade the public to change beliefs or behavior through expensive, expansive media campaigns. Designers painstakingly craft clear, resonant, and culturally sensitive messaging that will motivate people to buy a product, support a cause, vote for a candidate, or take active steps to improve their health. But once these campaigns leave the controlled environments of focus groups, advertising agencies, and stakeholder meetings to circulate, the public interprets and distorts the campaigns in ways their designers never intended or dreamed. In Best Laid Plans, Terence E. McDonnell explains why these attempts at mass persuasion often fail so badly. McDonnell argues that these well-designed campaigns are undergoing "cultural entropy": the process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. Using AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana, as its central case study, the book walks readers through best-practice, evidence-based media campaigns that fall totally flat. Female condoms are turned into bracelets, AIDS posters become home decorations, red ribbons fade into pink under the sun to name a few failures. These damaging cultural misfires are not random. Rather, McDonnell makes the case that these disruptions are patterned, widespread, and inevitable indicative of a broader process of cultural entropy.

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary "Lammy" Award in LGBTQ Studies The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ "two-spirit" identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Prior to contact with European settlers, most Native American tribes held their two-spirit members in high esteem, even considering them spiritually advanced. However, after contact - and religious conversion - attitudes changed and social and cultural support networks were ruptured. This discrimination led to a breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and practices, which in turn pushed many two-spirit members to participate in high-risk behaviors. The result is a disproportionate number of two-spirit members who currently test positive for HIV. Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco's two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.

Thirty years after AIDS was first recognized, the American South constitutes the epicenter of the United States' epidemic. Southern states claim the highest rates of new infections, the most AIDS-related deaths, and the largest number of adults and adolescents living with the virus. Moreover, the epidemic disproportionately affects African American communities across the region. Using the history of HIV in North Carolina as a case study, Stephen Inrig examines the rise of AIDS in the South in the period from the early spread and discovery of the disease through the late nineties. Drawing on epidemiological, archival, and oral history sources, Inrig probes the social determinants of health that put poor, rural, and minority communities at greater risk of HIV infection in the American South. He also examines the difficulties that health workers and AIDS organizations faced in reaching those communities, especially in the early years of the epidemic. His analysis provides an important counterweight to most accounts of the early history of the disease, which focus on urban areas and the spread of AIDS in the gay community. As one of the first historical studies of AIDS in a southern state, North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS provides powerful insight into the forces and factors that have made AIDS such an intractable health problem in the American South and the greater United States.

"Health Rights Are Civil Rights" tells the story of the important place of health in struggles for social change in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Jenna M. Loyd describes how Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and women's movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems and structural violence, working to establish the principle that health is a right. For a time--with President Nixon, big business, and organized labor in agreement on national health insurance--even universal health care seemed a real possibility.

"Health Rights Are Civil Rights" documents what many Los Angeles activists recognized: that militarization was in part responsible for the inequalities in American cities. This challenging new reading of suburban white flight explores how racial conflicts transpired across a Southland landscape shaped by defense spending. While the war in Vietnam constrained social spending, the New Right gained strength by seizing on the racialized and gendered politics of urban crisis to resist urban reinvestment and social programs.

Recapturing a little-known current of the era's activism, Loyd uses an intersectional approach to show why this diverse group of activists believed that democratic health care and ending war making were essential to create cities of freedom, peace, and social justice--a vision that goes unanswered still today.

Society was not prepared in 1981 for the appearance of a new infectious disease, but we have since learned that emerging and reemerging diseases will continue to challenge humanity. "AIDS at 30" is the first history of HIV/AIDS written for a general audience that emphasizes the medical response to the epidemic.Award-winning medical historian Victoria A. Harden approaches the AIDS virus from philosophical and intellectual perspectives in the history of medical science, discussing the process of scientific discovery, scientific evidence, and how laboratories found the cause of AIDS and developed therapeutic interventions. Similarly, her book places AIDS as the first infectious disease to be recognized simultaneously worldwide as a single phenomenon.After years of believing that vaccines and antibiotics would keep deadly epidemics away, researchers, doctors, patients, and the public were forced to abandon the arrogant assumption that they had conquered infectious diseases. By presenting an accessible discussion of the history of HIV/AIDS and analyzing how aspects of society advanced or hindered the response to the disease, "AIDS at 30" illustrates for both medical professionals and general readers how medicine identifies and evaluates new infectious diseases quickly and what political and cultural factors limit the medical community s response.

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have historically played an important role in delivering health and social services in developing countries; however, little research has been done on their role in HIV prevention and care, particularly in Latin America. This title describes FBO involvement in HIV/AIDS in three Central American countries hard hit by this epidemic: Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. The authors discuss the range of FBO activities and assess the implications of FBO involvement in addressing HIV/AIDS, such as churches' diverse presence and extensive reach, the unwillingness of some FBOs to discuss condom use, and their lack of experience in evaluating the impact of programs. A Spanish translation of this report is also available.

This provocative study examines the role of today's Russian Orthodox Church in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Russia has one of the fastest-growing rates of HIV infection in the world - 80 per cent from intravenous drug use - and the Church remains its only resource for fighting these diseases. Jarrett Zigon takes the reader into a Church-run treatment center where, along with self-transformational and religious approaches, he explores broader anthropological questions - of morality, ethics, what constitutes a 'normal' life, and who defines it as such. Zigon argues that this rare Russian partnership between sacred and political power carries unintended consequences: even as the Church condemns the influence of globalization as the root of the problem it seeks to combat, its programs are cultivating citizen-subjects ready for self-governance and responsibility, and better attuned to a world the Church ultimately opposes.

In some parts of South Africa, more than one in three people are HIV positive. Love in the Time of AIDS explores transformations in notions of gender and intimacy to try to understand the roots of this virulent epidemic. By living in an informal settlement and collecting love letters, cell phone text messages, oral histories, and archival materials, Mark Hunter details the everyday social inequalities that have resulted in untimely deaths. Hunter shows how first apartheid and then chronic unemployment have become entangled with ideas about femininity, masculinity, love, and sex and have created an economy of exchange that perpetuates the transmission of HIV/AIDS. This sobering ethnography challenges conventional understandings of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

This deeply insightful ethnography explores the healing power of caring and intimacy in a small, closely bonded Apostolic congregation during Botswana's HIV/AIDS pandemic. "Death in a Church of Life" paints a vivid picture of how members of the Baitshepi Church make strenuous efforts to sustain loving relationships amid widespread illness and death. Over the course of long-term fieldwork, Frederick Klaits discovered Baitshepi's distinctly maternal ethos and the 'spiritual' kinship embodied in the church's nurturing fellowship practice. Klaits shows that for Baitshepi members, Christian faith is a form of moral passion that counters practices of divination and witchcraft with redemptive hymn singing, prayer, and the use of therapeutic substances. An online audio annex makes available the examples of the church members' preachings and songs.

The spread of HIV/AIDS affects businesses in all sectors, all industries and all countries. For companies and organizations everywhere, the question is no longer whether to take action on HIV/AIDS but which actions to take. Complete with an impressive collection of complex background and research on HIV/AIDS and a foreword by Dr. Peter Piot, former Executive Director of UNAIDS, this volume collects case studies of managers worldwide faced with challenging HIV/AIDS-related management decisions. AIDS and Business will fascinate the general reader seeking an understanding of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and to the advanced reader looking to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the impact of the disease.

The case studies in this volume, set in nine countries, detail the issues facing businesses operating in areas where HIV/AIDS prevalence is growing. The topics discussed include understanding the role of social and cultural factors in the spread of HIV, the different organizations and institutions fighting the epidemic, designing an HIV communications campaign, HIV testing, ethical issues, marketing ethics and CSR, condoms marketing, and designing an HIV workplace program. Useful as a resource on HIV/AIDS and business, a set of case studies, or a training tool, this book contains a unique range of tools for learning to understand the epidemic, designed from a grounded and practical business perspective.

This groundbreaking work, with its unique anthropological approach, sheds new light on a central conundrum surrounding AIDS in Africa and in so doing, reframes current debates about the disease. Robert J. Thornton explores why HIV prevalence fell during the 1990s in Uganda despite that country's having one of Africa's highest fertility rates, while, during the same period, HIV prevalence rose in South Africa, a country with Africa's lowest fertility rate. Using anthropological, epidemiological, and mathematical methods, Thornton finds that culturally and socially determined differences in the structure of sexual networks - rather than changes in individual behavior - were responsible for these radical differences in HIV prevalence. His study exposes these invisible networks, or unimagined communities, unseen both by those who participate in them and by the social sciences, and opens a new area of investigation - the sexual network as social structure. Incorporating such factors as property, mobility, social status, and political authority into our understanding of AIDS transmission, Thornton offers a fresh vision of the disease, one that suggests new avenues for fighting it worldwide.

Reflecting the current state of research into the communication aspects of HIV/AIDS, this volume explores AIDS-related communication scholarship, moving forward from the 1992 publication AIDS: A Communication Perspective. Editors Timothy Edgar, Seth M. Noar, and Vicki S. Freimuth have developed this up-to-date collection to focus on today's key communication issues in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Chapters herein examine the interplay of the messages individuals receive about AIDS at the public level as well as the messages exchanged between individuals at the interpersonal level. Acknowledging how the face of HIV/AIDS has changed since 1992, the volume promotes the perspective that an understanding of effective communication through both mediated and interpersonal channels is essential to winning the continued battle against AIDS. Issues addressed here include: Social stigma associated with the disease, social support and those living with HIV/AIDS, and the current state of HIV testing Parent-child discussions surrounding HIV/AIDS and safer sexual behavior, and cultural sensitivity relating to developing HIV prevention and sex education programs The effectiveness of health campaigns to impact attitudes, norms, and behavior, as well as the current state of entertainment education and its ability to contribute to HIV prevention News media coverage of HIV/AIDS and the impact of the agenda-setting function on public opinion and policy making Health literacy and its importance to the health and well-being of those undergoing HIV treatment. The role of technological innovations, most notably the Internet, used for both prevention interventions as well as risky behavior The volume also includes exemplars that showcase the diversity of approaches to health communication used to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These cases include interpersonal and mass communication mediums; traditional along with new media and technology; research by academics and practitioners; individual as well as community-based approaches; work based in the United States and internationally; and campaigns directed at at-risk, HIV- positive, as well as general populations. With new topics, new contributors, and a broadened scope, this book goes beyond a revision of the 1992 volume to reflect the current state of communication research on HIV/AIDS across key contexts. It is designed for academics, researchers, practitioners, and students in health communication, health psychology, and other areas of AIDS research. As a unique examination of communication research, it makes an indelible contribution to the growing knowledge base of communication approaches to combating HIV/AIDS.

The vast majority of non-biomedical research on HIV/AIDS has been behavioural research, usually by survey methods, counting people's sex acts, partners, preferences, places, times and reasons for sex, and assessing levels of risk for HIV infection, revealing the dominance of seeing sex largely as behaviours. However, the notion of behaviours denudes sex of all meaning and pleasure. It neglects, as a result, how meaning and pleasure rely on context, how context exemplifies culture, and how culture is structured by history and discourse. When we drive our understanding of the epidemic by behaviours alone, we fail to comprehend that many of the social determinants of behaviour lie beyond the conscious apprehension of immediate acts and volitions, i.e. sexual behaviours are socially embedded practices. If we fail to understand the determinants of HIV risk and vulnerability as profoundly social- and by social is meant relational, contextual, cultural, political, economic, historical, symbolic and discursive- we fail to understand best how to intervene. Also, in such behavioural surveys, we are often concerned more with the sex of the sexual partner than the meaning of sex without a condom or an understanding of which circumstances within a sexual economy structure risk as, say, pleasure or intimacy, or social membership or an act of self-actualisation. Research undertaken in the mid-1990s among young people in seven developing countries revealed the importance of changing sexual meanings, sexual cultures and sexual identities in the patterns of sexual activity, forms of partnering, and meanings of sexual safety for young people within rapidly changing cultures.

One in six adults in sub-Saharan Africa will die in their prime of AIDS. It is a stunning cataclysm, plunging life expectancy to pre-modern levels and orphaning millions of children. Yet political trauma does not grip Africa. People living with AIDS are not rioting in the streets or overthrowing governments. In fact, democratic governance is spreading. Contrary to fearful predictions, the social fabric is not being ripped apart by bands of unsocialized orphan children. AIDS and Power explains why social and political life in Africa goes on in a remarkably normal way, and how political leaders have successfully managed the AIDS epidemic so as to overcome any threats to their power. Partly because of pervasive denial, AIDS is not a political priority for electorates, and therefore not for democratic leaders either. AIDS activists have not directly challenged the political order, instead using international networks to promote a rights-based approach to tackling the epidemic. African political systems have proven resilient in the face of AIDS's stresses, and rulers have learned to co-opt international AIDS efforts to their own political ends. In contrast with these successes, African governments and international agencies have a sorry record of tackling the epidemic itself. AIDS and Power concludes without political incentives for HIV prevention, this failure will persist.

Monitoring and analysis of public expenditure on HIV/AIDS is vital given the severity of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the substantial inflows of donor funds, and the critical need for investment from the national fiscus. Funding the fight aims to examine how governments in four African and five Latin American countries are funding the fight against HIV/AIDS, and simultaneously builds capacity for HIV/AIDS budget analysis within civil society. This study is unprecedented and invaluable for its unique research into government budget allocations for HIV/AIDS in these countries. No other such recent, targeted research exists in these countries, let alone is collected for its comparative value from a regional and cross-continental perspective. The research was generated by local, independent institutions within the countries concerned. The report therefore represents a collective effort by local NGOs to monitor their own government spending on HIV/AIDS, and thus to act as a watchdog to ensure that government resource allocation decisions reflect vital public priorities. The AIDS budget Unit (ABU) of Idasa contributes to the fight against HIV/AIDS in South Africa by engaging in research and training on resource-tracking for HIV/AIDS. In addition to monitoring government resource allocation for HIV/AIDS, ABU works to build capacity among civil society organisations and parliamentarians to actively engage in the South African budget process.

AIDS is now the leading cause of death in Africa, where twenty-eight million people are HIV-positive, and where some twelve million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In Zimbabwe, 45 percent of children under the age of five are HIV-positive, and the epidemic has shortened life expectancy by twenty-two years. A fifteen-year-old in Botswana or South Africa has a one-in-two chance of dying of AIDS. AIDS deaths are so widespread in sub-Saharan Africa that small children now play a new game called "Funerals." The Children of Africa Confront AIDS depicts the reality of how African children deal with the AIDS epidemic, and how the discourse of their vulnerability affects acts of coping and courage. A project of the Institute for the African Child at Ohio University, The Children of Africa Confront AIDS cuts across disciplines and issues to focus on the world's most marginalized population group, the children of Africa. Editors Arvind Singhal and Stephen Howard join conversations between humanitarian and political activists and academics, asking, "What shall we do?" Such discourse occurs in African contexts ranging from a social science classroom in Botswana to youth groups in Kenya and Ghana. The authors describe HIV/AIDS in its macro contexts of vulnerable children and the continent's democratization movements and also in its national contexts of civil conflict, rural poverty, youth organizations, and agencies working on the ground. Singhal, Howard, and other contributors draw on compelling personal experience in descriptions of HIV/AIDS interventions for children in difficult circumstances and present thoughtful insights into data gathered from surveys and observations concerning this terrible epidemic.

Relatively few people have access to anti-retroviral treatment in South Africa, and this is justified by the government on grounds of affordability, the author addresses South Africa's contentious AIDS policy from both an economic and ethical perspective, presenting: a history of AIDS policy in South Africa; an expert analysis of the macroeconomic impact of AIDS; a delineation of the relationship between AIDS and poverty and the challenges this poses for development, inequality and social solidarity; an investigation into how a programme preventing mother-to-child transmission would be less expensive than having to treat children with AIDS-related illnesses; an exploration of the relationship between AIDS treatment and risky sexual behaviour; an economic and social case for expanded AIDS prevention and treatment intervention.

While there is a growing list of publications devoted to the AIDS epidemic, Africa, with two-thirds of the world's cases, still receives scant attention. This book may change the way we think about AIDS and how it is being addressed in Africa and the rest of the world.
The book draws on first-hand research and in-depth investigations carried out by a team of researchers from Britain, Zambia and Tanzania, and focuses on the gendered aspect of the struggle against AIDS.
The authors study the severity of the epidemic and the threat it poses to the population and society in Tanzania and Zambia. They argue that the success of strategies against the spread of AIDS in Africa rests on their recognition of existing gendered power relations and that this success might be enhanced if the strategies are built on existing organisational skills and practices, especially among women. Their conclusions have repercussions for all countries around the world, and especially the rest of Africa.

eBook available with sample pages: PB:1841420247 EB:0203495292

The purpose of this book is to encourage professionals to become involved in family-oriented services to prevent the spread of HIV and its consequences and to provide examples of strategies for mobilizing family resources in the prevention and adaptation to HIV and AIDS. The members of the NIMH Consortium on Families and HIV/AIDS have prepared these chapters building on their research and practice experience. Together some of the nation?s most capable behavioral prevention and treatment scientists have developed these prevention programs based on sound scientific principles and are currently testing them in rigorous controlled trials in communities across the country. While these interventions have not yet been demonstrated to be effective, they have received rigorous peer review by independent scientists conducted under the auspices of the NIMH, and were considered worthy of research support. This book focuses on populations were HIV infection is now quickly spreading, and yet relatively little is know about family interventions with these populations. The prevention programs address the spectrum of programs to prevent the spread of HIV and its consequences. The HIV prevention programs are intended to promote greater responsibility in general, and thus encourage healthier lifestyles with respect to drug and sexual behavior among family members. Although not exclusively, a large proportion of the programs presented in this book were designed for African American populations and address the Prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS and its consequences. With that caveat, however, it should be noted that these interventions can also be adapted for use with other cultural groups, other chronic diseases, STDs and multiple family configurations.

Along with the distress associated with the diagnosis of a life-threatening disease, individuals with HIV also face huge social challenges based on reactions to their disease by other individuals and society. While there are numerous books covering research on risk of HIV infection and attitudes about the disease, limited empirical research on the social interaction process in coping with HIV exists. Carefully edited, HIV and Social Interaction explores the seropositive personAEs relationships with family, friends, intimate partners, and other members of his or her social network. The contributors present original theoretical models and research, derived from psychology and communication. Written with clarity, HIV and Social Interaction indicates how being HIV positive influences an individualAEs social interactions as well as interpersonal relationships. Chapters include the following topics: + The stigmatization of HIV and AIDS + Weighing the benefits and risks of self-disclosure about the HIV diagnosis + Accessing, finding, and maintaining quality social support + The value of group residence facilities for persons with AIDS + The effects of HIV on intimate relationships + The impact on volunteers who provide assistance to persons with AIDS In addition, the chapter authors discuss implications of their work for interventions and assisting HIV positive individuals, members of their social networks, health providers, and social services providers. A deeper understanding of these and related issues is vital for the comprehensive and empathetic delivery of services by healthcare professionals. HIV and Social Interaction is equally important for social scientists, students, as well as persons who are HIV-positive and anyone within their social network.

AIDS Alibis tackles the cultural landscape upon which AIDS, often accompanied by poverty, drug addiction, and crime, proliferates on a global scale. Stephanie Kane layers stories of individuals and events -- from Chicago to Belize City, to cyberspace -- to illustrate the paths of HIV infection and the effects of environment, government intervention, and social mores. Linking ordinary yet kindred lives in communities around the globe, Kane challenges the assumptions underlying the use of police and courts to solve health problems. The stories reveal the dynamics that determine how the policy decisions of white-collar health care professionals actually play out in real life. By focusing on life-changing social problems, the narratives highlight the contradictions between public health and criminal law. Look at how HIV has transformed our social consciousness, from intimate touch to institutional outreach. But, Kane argues, these changes are dwarfed by the United States's refusal to stop the war on drugs, in effect misdirecting resources and awareness. AIDS Alibis combines empirical and interpretive methods in a path-breaking attempt to recognize the extent to which coercive institutional practices are implicated in HIV transmission patterns. Kane shows how th e virus feeds on the politics of inequality and indifference, even as it exploits the human need for intimacy and release.

HIV/AIDS affects women worldwide. Yet intervention programmes often fail to take into account the different cultures and behaviours that make women more vulnerable than men. Although policy debates increasingly include women and gender considerations, funds and resources for women, especially those already suffering with HIV/AIDS, remain inadequate. "Women's Experiences with HIV/AIDS" recounts the experiences of individual women whose daily struggles and concerns are ignored in the larger dialogues about HIV/AIDS. Women and men from diverse backgrounds discuss the differences between women within and across cultures and how particular traditions and attitudes can determine a woman's vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. This collection provides a much-needed examination of the interventions and policies that do not yet fully address the needs and limitations of women suffering with infection, or confronted by that possibility.

In an original and stimulating analysis of gender and AIDS, Tamsin Wilton assesses safer sex health promotion and health education discourse, and considers their unintended consequences for the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Taking a queer/feminist constructionist position, she links issues of power, gender, sexuality and nationalism to offer a sound theoretical foundation for an effective and radical HIV/AIDS health promotion strategy. EnGendering AIDS draws on safer sex materials from the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Scandinavia, and sets current practice against the historical context of VD/STD education, dissecting the role played by STDs in the cultural construction of gender. Wilton debates the meanings that erotic minorities read into bodies and desires, and how these have been transformed by AIDS, and suggests a new model of pornography that disengages the sexually explicit and/or erotically arousing from gendered power relations.