Forskningsseminar: Rettigheder, agency og globale reaktioner på HIV/AIDS i det sydlige Afrika

TIME: Tuesday, 8 November at 14.15-17.15

VENUE: Centre for Health and Society, building 7, room 7.0.34

How useful is the concept of human rights as a tool for analysis or action in relation to struggles to reduce the vulnerability of youth and women to HIV/AIDS, and efforts to make services more accessible to these groups

TIME: Tuesday, 8 November at 14.15-17.15

VENUE: Centre for Health and Society, building 7, room 7.0.34

How useful is the concept of human rights as a tool for analysis or action in relation to struggles to reduce the vulnerability of youth and women to HIV/AIDS, and efforts to make services more accessible to these groups

Within the field of social development for health in resource poor settings, there is growing criticism of human rights discourses that focus on peoples’ sexual and reproductive health rights, in the absence of attention to the social and economic contexts that enable or limit peoples’ opportunities to exercise them.

There is also growing cynicism about the way peoples’ so-called ‘rights to health’ have become increasingly depoliticised in a neo-liberal environment where public health programmes are more likely to focus on achieving ‘cost effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ through the provision of technical services than in seeking to transform the social environments that limit peoples’ opportunities for health, or to enhance peoples’ capabilities to live the lives they would choose.

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of an AIDS intervention in South Africa, which sought to empower women and youth to lead a local AIDS responses in a deep rural area, a paper by researcher Bent Steenberg Olsen explores these debates through a discussion of the light this case study throws on the ways in which the flows of resources, expertise and influence characterising the globalisation of the AIDS response have impacted on opportunities for the exercise of health-related agency by members of target communities.

Catherine Campbell, Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics, has worked in the HIV/AIDS field since 1994. Her work is governed by her interest in and commitment to developing actionable understandings of the social determinants of HIV/AIDS, as well as of those factors – ranging from the micro-local to the global – that facilitate or limit the ability of AIDS vulnerable groups to protect their health and well-being.

To date, Campbell has published around 70 much-cited peer-reviewed articles in international journals and chapters in edited books on social aspects of HIV/AIDS. She has also written plain English language booklets ‘translating’ her academic work for non-academic NGO audiences, and a much reviewed and widely-read single-authored monograph, Letting them die? Why HIV/AIDS prevention programmes often fail (Indiana University Press, 2003).

Programme:

14.15 – 14.30: Introductory remarks by Lisa Ann Richey

14.30 – 15.30: Keynote presentation by Catherine Campbell

15.30 – 16.00: Coffee and cake

16.00 – 17.15: Round table discussion based on ‘5 points for engagement’ prepared by PhD students