Nouvelle(s) 11 de 18

From the official Press Release, 14 December, 2005:

"Pretoria – An AIDS epidemic as severe as the one plowing through South Africa will change society. But how and along what lines? Buckling: The impact of AIDS in South Africa, a new publication by Hein Marais, tackles the question in distinctive and critical-minded fashion – and arrives at disquieting and surprising conclusions.

A detailed, multidisciplinary review of research evidence, this short book adopts a unique perspective which reveals more clearly the contingency and complexity of the epidemic’s effects. It shows how conventional conceptions of AIDS impact (and programme responses) tend to reflect dominant ideological fixations – particularly the overriding emphasis on productive processes and economic growth, governance and security – and how the wellbeing of humans typically is refracted through those preoccupations. Many accounts of AIDS impact, Marais demonstrates, are misdirected. They ignore the distribution of risk and responsibility in society, and skirt the interplay of the epidemic with the dynamics that determine the distribution of power, resources and entitlements. As a result, they underplay the inordinate extent to which the epidemic’s burdens are being deflected onto, and concentrated among the least-privileged sections of society – causing even harsher polarization and petrifying social arrangements. Commonplace understandings of the epidemic’s impact and of the kinds of strategies that could contain and repair the damage, Buckling argues, must be revised."

Read more...

To download this new publication, please visit: http://www.csa.za.org/filemanager/fileview/101/

Contact:

Johan Maritz
Centre for the Study of AIDS
University of Pretoria
Tel: +27 12 420 4410 / +27 83 580 9138
Fax: +27 12 420 4395
johan.maritz@up.ac.za
www.csa.za.org  

December 14, 2005

Nouvelle(s) 11 de 18