New infections with HIV remain an urgent problem among young people in Africa, but many young Africans pursue sexual relationships with little thought about the epidemic. This book examines young people's sexual relationships in a region typical of rural sub-Saharan Africa and investigates why the risk of HIV infection generally was not a salient concern for them. It is based on an extraordinarily large and representative qualitative study that was affiliated with an adolescent se...

Taking the Great Rift Valley - the geological fault that will eventually tear Africa in two - as his central metaphor, Alex Perry explores the split between a resurgent Africa and a world at odds with its rise. Africa has long been misunderstood - and abused - by outsiders. Perry travelled the continent for most of a decade, meeting with entrepreneurs and warlords, professors and cocaine smugglers, presidents and jihadis, among many others.Opening with a devastating investigation i...

In 1979, Dr. Allan Ronald, a specialist in infectious diseases from Canada, and Dr. Herbert Nsanze, head of medical microbiology at University of Nairobi, met through the World Health Organization. Ronald had just completed a successful project that cured a chancroid (genital ulcer) epidemic in Winnipeg and Nsanze asked him to come to Kenya to help with Kenya’s “sexual diseases problem.” That initial invitation led to a groundbreaking international scientific collaboration that would uncov...

Medical advances prolong life. They also sometimes prolong suffering. Should we protect life or alleviate suffering? This dilemma formed the foundation for a powerful right-to-die movement and a counterbalancing concern over an emerging culture of death. What are the qualities of a life worth living? Where are the boundaries of tolerable suffering? This book is based on a hugely popular undergraduate course taught at the University of Texas, and is ideal for those interested in the social ...

One in six adults in sub-Saharan Africa will die in their prime of AIDS. It is a stunning cataclysm, plunging life expectancy to pre-modern levels and orphaning millions of children. Yet political trauma does not grip Africa. People living with AIDS are not rioting in the streets or overthrowing governments. In fact, democratic governance is spreading. Contrary to fearful predictions, the social fabric is not being ripped apart by bands of unsocialized orphan children.AIDS and Powe...

Even though sub-Saharan Africa is the region most affected by HIV/AIDS in the world, no new theories have been discovered, and questions about life and death are ignored. This book uses certain selected communication practices to offer the foundations of an African theory of communication, applicable to the crisis of HIV/AIDS.

Human health exists at the interface of environment and society. Decades of work by researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers has shown that health is shaped by a myriad of factors, including the biophysical environment, climate, political economy, gender, social networks, culture, and infrastructure. Yet while there is emerging interest within the natural and social sciences on the social and ecological dimensions of human disease and health, there have been few studies that address t...

The global expansion of HIV programming (HIV "scale-up") and the growth of global health in the past decade reshaped politics, power, civic relations, and citizen subjectivities in countries across the globe. This book draws on interdisciplinary research from numerous sites in the Global South to examine the political dimensions of HIV and global health programming. The chapters reflect extensive methodological diversity and geographic range, yet exhibit striking resonance with the book’s ...

A conversation about resistance...to life's experiences.If I had one afternoon to spend with my friend Lily, just diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, what would I say?I had been where she is now, yet against all the odds found the way to experience a complete and spontaneous healing. The secrets I was shown are the opposite of what society teaches us. This was not a miracle (as it may seem).Resistance: all the ways we avoid and fight with lif...

All over the world, men as well as women exchange sex for money and other forms of reward, sometimes with other men and sometimes with women. In contrast to female prostitution, however, relatively little is known about male sex work, leaving questions unanswered about the individuals involved: their identities and self-understandings, the practices concerned, and the contexts in which they take place.This book updates the ground-breaking 1998 volume of the same name with an entire...

Winner of the 2017 Jabuti Book PrizeThe Zika virus is devastating lives and communities. Children across the Americas are being born with severe disabilities because of it. Yet during the desolating outbreak, Brazil played host to both the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, leading many to suspect that the true impact of the virus has been subject to a cover-up of international proportions.Beginning in the northeast, where the devastation has been most felt, ...

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of an epochal shift in global order – the fact that global-south countries have taken up leadership roles in peacekeeping missions, humanitarian interventions, and transnational military industries: Brazil has taken charge of the UN military mission in Haiti; Nigeria has deployed peacekeeping troops throughout West Africa; Indonesians have assumed crucial roles in UN Afghanistan operations; Fijians, South Africans, and Chileans have becam...