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Professor Karen Malone
Karen Malone has extensive experience in research and community capacity building work and participation workshops. These have been underwritten by a
variety of agencies such as UNESCO, ARC, Peace Corps, AUSAID and IUCN. She is currently Asia-Pacific Director of the UNESCO Growing Up In Cities
project ? an international program for environmental action and research that won the prestigious International EDRA award in 2001. The UNESCO entry to EDRA included projects from eight cities, including Jill Kruger?s from Johannesburg.
Karen has recently been working with UNESCO on their Small Island nations projects (as coordinator of children's participation in environment and development issues) and with the UNICEF Child Friendly Cities Initiatives. She has written numerous articles and book chapters and presented keynote addresses internationally. She has run workshops for community members, youth workers, city council officers and Masters and Doctoral students in participatory research and evaluation methods. She has experience in the development and design of face-to-face, distance and online modules and workshops in the areas of education, participatory research methods, narrative research, children's environments and youth culture.
Dr James Colgrove and Robert Sember
James Colgrove, PhD, MPH is an associate research scientist at the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University?s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City. As a HIVAN fellow, he will conduct historical research at McCord Hospital in Durban. This project seeks to examine broad changes in the South African health care system by focusing on the experience of an individual institution. It is the first phase of a planned ongoing study of the response of the health care system to the crisis of HIV. This research is complementary to the current Partnership Project between HIVAN and the Mailman School of Public Health, which is documenting, through collaborative ethnographic research, the community impact of the roll-out of anti-retroviral medications. Colgrove?s prior research has examined the social, political and ethical aspects of health policy in the U.S. His articles have been published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Science, Health Affairs, and the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. His recently completed book manuscript, State of Immunity, examines the evolution of U.S. vaccination policy in the twentieth century.
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 Robert Sember is a researcher in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.? His work focuses on the prevention, treatment and policy aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.? He has managed and directed programs focused on the needs of minority populations, including inner city youth, transgender people, homeless person with multiple diagnoses, incarcerated men and women, American Indians and Alaskan Natives, and border communities.? He is currently involved in Ford Foundation funded research on sexual rights policy globally and a National Institutes of Health funded study on the impact of ARV treatment access on women in KwaZulu-Natal.? This latter study involves a partnership between HIVAN and the Mailman School of Public Health.? Robert is also involved in UNAIDS funded work on the contributions artists make to mobilizing communities to respond to the HIV/ AIDS epidemic.? He explores his interest in the intersection between health and culture in classes he teaches in Medical Humanities in Columbia Universitys School of Medicine and as a member of the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University.? Robert is an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Public Health.? He was born and raised in Durban, South Africa.
Professor Dennis Altman
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Prof Dennis Altman
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Prof Dennis Altman, a HIVAN Fellow will be in Kwazulu Natal during August 2003 and will give a round of lectures. The topics include "Sexual Identities in a Era of Globalisation" and "Human Security and HIV, the Tragic Lessons of South Africa".
Dennis Altman is Professor of Politics at LaTrobe University, Melbourne, and author of ten books, most recently "Global Sex" (University of Chicago, 2001), which was written in part with the support of a Macarthur Foundation Research and Writing Fellowship, and is being translated into Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Spanish and Italian. His other books relevant to HIV/AIDS are "Power and Community" (1994) and "AIDS and the New Puritanism" (1986) and he has written widely on sexuality and politics.
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Professor Jack Caldwell and Pat Caldwell: The African AIDS Epidemic
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Prof Jack Caldwell
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The Caldwells have legendary status in African Population Studies and Demography. Latterly they have come to be leaders in the area of African HIV studies in both the fields of Health and multi-disciplinary Social Science. They have been responsible for developing two (and currently three) generations of Population Scientists in Africa and Bangladesh.
Emeritus Professor Jack Caldwell was head of the Australian National University's Department of Demography for almost 20 years, and Coordinator of the University's Health Transition Centre in its National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health from 1994 to 2002. He was President of the demographers' international learned society, the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, from 1993 until 1997, the only Australian to have occupied this post. He has been on the Australian delegation to each of the decennial World Population Conferences. He and his wife, Pat Caldwell, have been carrying out research around the world on issues of population growth for over 40 years, some of the findings being recorded in 20 books and 250 chapters and papers in professional journals. Pat brings to Population Studies the specific focus of anthropology and qualitative research.
HIVAN are pleased to welcome both Jack and Pat as Fellows of HIVAN. They will be with resident at HIVAN during the month of October 2002.
Copies of Professor Caldwell's papers, "The African AIDS Epidemic" and "The Fertility Transition in Subsaharan Africa", can be downloaded by clicking here
For a full report on the MRC KZN AIDS Forum seminar, which was held in association with HIVAN and where Prof Caldwell presented his paper, "The African AIDS Epidemic", please click here
Community Responses to HIV/AIDS
Principal Investigator: Dr Catherine Campbell, HIVAN Fellow, Reader in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics
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Cathy Campbell and Carol-Ann Foulis
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In the light of the dearth of formal medical resources and capacity in the face of the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, grassroots lay people are playing an increasingly central role in the management of HIV/AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal. It will also be their task to reconstruct shattered communities once the epidemic has run its course. Within such a context, community strengthening approaches have a vital role to play alongside biomedical and behavioural responses to the epidemic. Against this background, the proposed research aims to analyse grassroots community responses to the challenges of HIV prevention and AIDS care, and the forms of grassroots local knowledge and skills that have evolved in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This will be done through focusing on the responses of (i) traditional healers, (ii) young people and (iii) NGOs dealing with orphans and home-based care. This analysis will be conducted in the interests of providing both 'guidelines for best practice' and theoretical frameworks to inform policies and interventions which seek to strengthen local community responses to HIV/AIDS.
Between 1994 and 2001 the Proposed Principal Investigator was involved in the implementation and process evaluation of a large community-led HIV-prevention programme in Carletonville, near Johannesburg. The project was based on textbook state-of-the-art ideals of local community participation and local stakeholder management. However, as the life of this theoretically and politically well-informed project unfolded, it became clear that while the ideals of community mobilisation and grassroots participation make good theoretical, intuitive and political sense, much remains to be learned about the complexities of implementing these ideals in real world contexts.
The "paradigm drift" towards community-based HIV-prevention programmes, and community-led strategies for the care of PLWAs and AIDS orphans, has highlighted the importance of addressing the following questions:
- What constitutes a 'health-enabling community context' (a context which enables and supports health-enhancing sexual behaviour, as well as the tolerant care and support of PLWAs and AIDS orphans?) and
- How best to promote the development of such contexts in local communities where HIV/AIDS flourishes.
The proposed project will address these questions through studies of three forms of grassroots participation:
- grassroots participation in HIV-prevention (focusing both on youth and traditional healers);
- grassroots participation in AIDS-care (focusing on traditional healers and NGOs); and
- local community mobilisation as a general community strengthening strategy (traditional healers, youth and NGOs) with particular reference to strengthening communities to provide care and support to orphans and home-based care for PLWAs (NGOs).
Role of researcher/ senior researcher
Carol-Ann Foulis, as incumbent of this post, works closely with Dr Campbell in conducting the research outlined above. Dr Campbell (who is based at the London School of Economics) is in frequent email or telephone contact with Carol-Ann, as well as visiting Durban regularly for periods of joint work. Where funding is available, and if they wish to do so, Carol-Ann may visit the L.S.E. for short periods of joint work. Dr Campbell undertakes intellectual leadership of the project, as well as leadership of the research design and analysis, and Carol-Ann manages the collection and analysis of research findings.
Carol-Ann's tasks include:
- conducting literature reviews as necessary
- liaising with appropriate community organisations and individuals
- employing and supervising research assistants
- supervising MA students who will assist with data collection
- managing the translation and transcription of interview findings
- collecting documentary data as necessary
- analysing research findings in collaboration with Dr Campbell
- co-authoring papers in collaboration with Dr Campbell and other appropriate authors
- preparing a manual for use by community organisations
- supervising the construction of a web-site
- presenting invited talks and conference papers, as well as presenting regular seminars or 'updates of findings' in the project's guest academic department(s) as necessary.
Dr Campbell's website can be viewed by clicking here
Bonding and Bridging for Social Transformation
An interview with Dr Cathy Campbell, HIVAN Research Fellow
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Dr Cathy Campbell
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A cursory glance at Dr Cathy Campbell's impressive list of publications and presentations quickly reveals the scope and substance of her research into the social and behavioural aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly in less affluent countries. Her investigations of the social psychology of health inequalities relating to gender, ethnic and socio-economic identities have yielded an impressive body of work that integrates topics such as social capital, community participation, public health policy and intervention programmes.
Born and raised in South Africa, Dr Campbell worked as a journalist and later as a clinical and community psychologist prior to completing a PhD at the University of Bristol. She lectured at the University of Natal in Durban until 1993, when she took up her current post as a Reader in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics. Dr Campbell teaches on the MSc. in Social Psychology and is the Director of the PhD programme; she also supervises doctoral studies in the fields of HIV/AIDS, health promotion and community development in Asia, Africa, South America and Europe.
More recently, her research energies have been directed to two projects, the first being an study of community-level influences on the transmission and prevention of HIV/AIDS, focusing on intervention programmes for commercial sex-workers, young people and migrant mineworkers in South Africa. This project has examined the social construction of sexuality, community-led peer education, and multi-stakeholder project management.
The second study has been concerned with the impact of ethnic identities on local community participation in the context of public health policy in England. The clear link between the two projects is an interest in the conceptual axis offered by the notion of social capital as a tool for the formation of effective health policies - within a critical framework which is sensitive to the links between social capital and poverty.
Dr Campbell sees the strengthening of social capital within poor communities as essential to manifesting positive outcomes in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. "There are two aspects to this process," she says, "and both involve developing positive social identities based on trust, partnership and participation. On one level, this requires the bonding of homogenous groupings such as home-based caregivers, sex-workers, youth, etc. within communities. On another, broader level, it requires the formation of bridging alliances between the smaller groups and more powerful authority groups such as the private sector and government."
Her vision for effective HIV/AIDS interventions and policies is far-reaching, in that it envisages a future social framework in which the needs of all sectors and communities are met through active and mutually beneficial linkages and partnerships. "We also need to break through the boundaries of our historical, largely exclusive academic disciplines, be they biomedical or social and behavioural. The mindsets and languages of these disciplines are so different," she says. "And it's not only more collaboration that is required: we also need more thorough theoretical evaluation of such collaboration, to find the models and lessons, and to draw together the best practices into sound organisational infrastructures."
There is already recognition, both locally and internationally, that this holistic process needs to be scaled up. In South Africa, medical scientists working on anti-retroviral therapy and the development of vaccines and microbicides concur with health authorities and HIV/AIDS activists that access to treatment must go hand-in-hand with effective prevention and care programmes.
"All the diverse actors in the HIV/AIDS field are deeply committed to making this work," says Campbell, "but at this stage they are too dispersed to have any significant impact. We have the ideas, the goodwill and the funds, as well as a concern for social justice and its bearing on the epidemic, but the systems for true partnership within society do not exist yet. So now the question is: what do we 'scale up'?"
She believes that the primary audiences for which these systems need to be established are grassroots communities, teachers and trainers, funders and researchers. "Broader transformation needs to be based on clarity regarding the factors and mechanisms that promote and undermine social change. Researchers need to explain their roles and objectives clearly to community members, noting that practical interventions are likely to be long-term in nature. This would enable community members to grasp that their own roles will serve to lead society into a new era of equity and empowerment."
Given the tragic proportions of the epidemic, particularly in South Africa, this "long-term" view of the process might seem at odds with the immediacy of the needs of those infected and affected by the virus. However, Dr Campbell is motivated by her experience of having grown up through the era of apartheid. "In many ways I was influenced by having had a close personal perspective of the huge injustices prevalent here during the sixties and seventies," she explains, "but more importantly, through the eighties and nineties, we saw such massive positive social change, and now the world looks to us as an exemplar."
"The existing reality of HIV/AIDS is horrific, but we must focus on our miracles and on translating our characteristic energy and vision into a new reality. I am very privileged to be able to move between two countries and two social contexts, which heightens my awareness of their rich diversity of resources and creative capacity. Transformation will take time, but what drives me forward is knowing how much practice there is to back the theory, and being directly engaged in the mobilisation effort."
Both geographically and intellectually, Dr Campbell's life and work is about building bridges. Making the pieces fit together and believing in the ultimate whole of an AIDS-free society is a vision to which every one of us can relate and contribute.
Judith King - HIVAN Media and Communications Officer.
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