Overview > Previous NCS Programs > 2004-2005

Co-Chairs/Members: Bolane Adetoun, Kawango Agot, Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Shanti Parikh

Goal Statement:

There is a widely recognized disconnect between HIV/AIDS and sexual health policy and intervention and the experienced realities and lives of the people and communities most affected by the epidemic. As the spread of the epidemic accelerates, it has become evident that the behavioral health and risk reduction models used to understand and address the epidemic are inadequate. These traditional behavioral health models often assume that populations are undifferentiated (by sex or class), that males and females have equal control over their sexual health decisions, that individuals act autonomously, and that culture is an impediment to risk reduction. Such assumptions narrowly define the spread of HIV as a problem of the individual and fail to account for the political economy-or, the socio-cultural and economic embeddedness and structural inequalities-surrounding sexual and sexual health decisions. In some ways, this failure to account for context and structural inequalities is practical. Social scientists often present theories and methods that appear too abstract and too widely cast to be incorporated into a single policy or intervention. Our challenge is to translate social science theories and gender analysis into usable terms for policy-makers and prevention programs.

The Sexuality/Health working group seeks to advance the working relationship between social science theory and methods and sexual health and HIV/AIDS policy-making and intervention programs. We propose to address this gap by developing conceptual frameworks that consider both the social, economic, political, and gendered structures on one hand, and people's understandings and lived experiences of sexuality and sexual health decision-making on the other. Through our individual NCS research projects we will bridge the gap between feminist theory and HIV/AIDS intervention by considering the multi-leveled socialization of sexuality among young people in Ghana, how the analytic concept of power can be used to investigate male/female relationships in Nigeria, how widows in Kenya understand the practice of widow inheritance and the associated risk to HIV within the local gender and cultural landscapes, and how a law intended to protect girls from preying older males has been misappropriated by communities in ways that strengthens patriarchal control over the female body and reduces female sexual agency in Uganda.

Back to Top

The conceptual frameworks and findings from each of these studies will be used as examples for how social science can be used to inform and evaluate policy and intervention in ways that brings the voices of people and the realities of community unity and hierarchies into the intervention creation and evaluation process.

Next Steps:

• Post our individual NCS project proposals to WebCT,
  
  
• Identify 1-2 research articles that effectively illustrate how social science can inform
  and /or evaluate HIV/AIDS and sexual health policy and prevention efforts
  
  
• Begin designing a conceptual framework from our individual NCS research projects that highlights how social science methods and theory can inform HIV/AIDS policy and prevention

Long-Term Projects:

• Facilitate a seminar that brings social scientists working on issues of sex, gender, and power into dialogue with sexual health policy makers and designers of intervention programs. The site being discussed for this seminar is Ghana and a collaborating organization is CODESDA. The intention of this seminar is to foster a longer-term mechanism through which social science departments/scholars and HIV/AIDS agencies and policy-makers can collaborate.
  
  
• Create a special edition of a journal available in sub-Saharan Africa that provides analysis of how social science theory and methods can be effectively used to inform policy and intervention. Potential Africa-based journals include African Journal of Reproductive Health published in Nigeria and Feminist Africa published by the African Gender Institute in Cape Town.