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"Letting them die" - Prof Catherine Campbell - Book Launch

• Date: Thursday 18th September 2003
• Time: 17h30 for 18h00
• Venue: Ike?’s Book Shop ?– 48a Florida Road, Durban
• Please RSVP with: Andisha Maharaj - Telephone: 031 ?– 268 5809, by Monday 15th September 2003.
  
  Biosketch -Professor Catherine Campbell
  
  Born and raised in South Africa, Professor Catherine 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 KwaZulu-Natal in Durban until 1993, when she took up her current post as a Reader in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics. Prof Campbell teaches on the MSc. core courses in Social Psychology and supervises doctoral studies in the fields of HIV/AIDS, health promotion and community development in Asia, Africa, South America and Europe.
  
  Prof Campbell's impressive list of publications and presentations 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.
  
  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.
  
  Prof Campbell?’s association with HIVAN, (the Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking) as a Research Fellow involves a role as Principal Investigator in a KZN-based project entitled ?“Community Responses to HIV/AIDS?”. The project focuses on grassroots participation in HIV prevention, AIDS care and local community mobilisation as a strengthening strategy.
  
  Prof Campbell?’s 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 partnerships, and through transcending the boundaries of our historical, largely exclusive academic disciplines, be they biomedical or social and behavioural. She also advocates more thorough theoretical evaluation of such collaborations, in order to determine the models and lessons, and to draw together the best practices into sound organisational infrastructures.
  
  "Letting Them Die - Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes Often Fail" - Synopsis
  
  Why do people knowingly engage in sexual behaviour that could lead to a slow and painful premature death? Why do the best-intentioned HIV-prevention programmes often have so little impact?
  
  A new book entitled ?“Letting them die ?– why HIV/AIDS intervention programmes fail?”, written by social psychologist Professor Catherine Campbell, addresses these questions.
  
  Professor Campbell is a Reader at the London School of Economics and a Research Fellow at HIVAN, (the Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking, based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban). The book?’s title is derived from South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys?’s comment that: "In the old South Africa we killed people. Now we're just letting them die."
  
  The book is an examination of the social constructs and unique contexts of sexuality, participation and social change, compiled through detailed study of the processes yielded by a large-scale participatory HIV/AIDS intervention strategy undertaken in Summertown, a small mining township in the South African province of Gauteng, over a three-year period during the late 1990s.
  
  In her observation of the process of the Summertown Project, which focused on limiting the spread of HIV through a multi-layered, well-resourced, community-led intervention programme and the promotion of partnerships and alliances between community stakeholders, Campbell led the documentation of responses from participants amongst four groups of people: migrant mineworkers, commercial sex-workers, young people and a diverse array of community stakeholders committed to implementing this complex and ambitious intervention programme.
  
  The book presents the history and goals of the Summertown Project, the theoretical framework within which the research was evaluated, the distillation of the documentation from the interviews and focus group sessions, and the consolidation of the findings into what manifestly emerged as a mobilisation strategy with "less than optimal results". The concluding chapter confronts these findings, and, drawing on social psychology, sociology, anthropology and social medicine, evaluates the elements and dynamics of power-bases inherent in the seen and unseen structures of impoverished communities struggling to address effects of the epidemic in South Africa.
  
  "Letting them die" is a forceful presentation of the earliest and most comprehensively researched critique of the participatory community development approach to HIV prevention. It also contains recommendations that reshape and invigorate the approach so as to promote health-enabling community contexts, and to strengthen social capital so that survivors of the epidemic might reconstruct their lives with some prospect of success.
  
  Published by The International African Institute in association with James Currey (Oxford) / Indiana University Press (Bloomington) / Double Storey Books (a Juta Company, Cape Town). 2003
  
  The book is available at all leading bookstores in South Africa, including Adams Campus Bookshop at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban (Telephone 031- 261 2320), or can be ordered directly from the publisher, c/o Kathy Pittaway on the following email address: [email protected]
  
  To view the author?’s research profile and publications, visit the following webpage address: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/socialPsychology/whosWho/campbell.htm