Language and HIV/AIDS (Critical Language and Literacy Studies, Band 5) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847692192 ISBN 13: 9781847692191

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

This volume focuses on the role of language in the construction of knowledge about HIV/AIDS in diverse regions of the world. The collection of studies yields helpful insights about the discursive construction of this knowledge in both formal and informal contexts, while demonstrating how the tools of applied linguistics can be exercised to reveal a deeper understanding of the production and dissemination of this knowledge. The authors use a range of qualitative methodologies to critically explore the role of language and discourse in educational contexts in which various and sometimes competing forms of knowledge about HIV/AIDS are constructed. They draw on various forms of discourse analysis, ethnography, and social semiotics to interpret meaning-making practices in HIV/AIDS education in Australia, Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Hong Kong, India, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, and Uganda.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr Christina Higgins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she teaches courses in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and intercultural communication. Her recent research has focused on communication in NGO-sponsored HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness education in Tanzania, where she has investigated the discursive construction of local and global worldviews. In her book, English as a local language: Post-colonial identities and multilingual practices (Multilingual Matters), she has also explored the role of language and popular culture in HIV/AIDS awareness efforts in hip hop lyrics and in public health advertisements. Her website can be found at http: //www2.hawaii.edu/ cmhiggin.

Dr Bonny Norton is Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Canada. Her award-winning research addresses identity and language learning, education and international development, and critical literacy. Her current research investigates the use of innovative technology to promote multilingual literacy in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent publications include Identity and Language Learning (Longman/Pearson, 2000); Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2004, w. K. Toohey); and Gender and English Language Learners (TESOL, 2004, w. A. Pavlenko). Her website can be found at http: //lerc.educ.ubc.ca/fac/norton/.

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Language and HIV/AIDS

By Christina Higgins, Bonny Norton

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2010 Christina Higgins, Bonny Norton and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-219-1

Contents

Contributors, 
Abbreviations, 
Preface, 
Introduction, 
Christina Higgins and Bonny Norton, 
Section 1: Constructions of Knowledge about HIV/AIDS, 
1 Lengths of Life: Stories of Being with HIV William Savage, 
2 Ugandan Students' Visual Representations of Health Literacies: A Focus on HIV/AIDS Knowledge Harriet Mutonyi and Maureen E. Kendrick, 
3 Is it Safer to Talk about Sex in Spanish or English? Performing Young Adulthood in Oaxaca, Mexico Ángeles Clemente and Michael J. Higgins, 
4 Safe Sex – Not So Straightforward: Intersubjective Positioning in Gay Men's Accounts of Sexual Exposure to HIV Henrike Körner, 
Section 2: Gendered Practices in the Spread of HIV/AIDS, 
5 Dangerous Dogmas: AIDS, Discourse and the RakhelSystem in India Noushin Khushrushahi, 
6 Discursive Constructions of Responsibility in HIV/AIDS Prevention: Re-entextualization Practices in Tanzania Christina Higgins, 
7 Uganda's ABC Program on HIV/AIDS Prevention: A Discursive Site of Struggle Shelley Jones and Bonny Norton, 
Section 3: The Place of Local Knowledge in HIV/AIDS Educational Practices, 
8 Learning about AIDS Online: Identity and Expertise on a Gay Internet Forum Rodney H. Jones, 
9 Contextualizing Local Knowledge: Reformulations in HIV/AIDS Prevention in Burkina Faso Martina Drescher, 
10 What Difference Does This Make? Studying Southern African Youth as Knowledge Producers within a New Literacy of HIV and AIDS Claudia Mitchell, Jean Stuart, Naydene de Lange, Relebohile Moletsane, Thabisile Buthelezi, June Larkin and Sarah Flicker, 
Section 4: Institutional Responses to HIV/AIDS, 
11 Articulations of Knowing: NGOs and HIV-Positive Health in India Mark Finn and Srikant Sarangi, 
12 Signs Show the Way: Reading HIV Prevention on the Andaman Islands Annabelle Mooney, 
Author Index, 
Subject Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Lengths of Life: Stories of Being with HIV

WILLIAM SAVAGE

Introduction

The premise of this chapter is that an effective way for people to understand about HIV and AIDS is for them to learn to listen to and tell stories of what it is like to be infected with the virus and/or affected by the epidemic. Framed around life, location, self and journey, I narrate parts of my story of learning to live and be well as an HIV-positive gay man. While this is a reflective essay on my experiences, I also reference additional perspectives in the other 11 chapters about living and working with HIV and AIDS around the world. In many ways, all of the chapters in this collection are also stories; in some the faces of the people are easily seen, and in others we need to look carefully at and through the numbers and descriptions for the faces to emerge. As Rodney Jones (this volume) points out, 'If AIDS educators wish to understand how to implement truly "community based" prevention efforts, they must understand how people talk about and teach one another about HIV in their everyday lives, and how community constructions of HIV and the risks associated with it appropriate, adapt and contest more official constructions from media and public health discourses'.

Although colleagues in our various fields continue to debate the place of autobiography and narrative inquiry in research, it is not my intention here to review that dialogue. Rather I want to celebrate some of what listening to and telling stories offer us as people who work at or are intrigued by the intersection of education and applied linguistics and HIV and AIDS, what Pavlenko (2007: 166–167) refers to as 'attention to ways in which storytellers use language to interpret experiences and position themselves as particular kinds of people'. It is among my purposes to be part of what Bell (2002: 209, referencing Canagarajah, 1996) highlights as an 'opportunity for marginalized groups to participate in knowledge construction in the academy'.

Lengths of Life

'My name is Bill Savage and I tested positive for HIV in December 1995.' I had gone to Sydney, Australia, from where I lived and worked in Bangkok, uncertain at that time as to what might happen if I tested positive as a foreign resident of Thailand. For years I had lived with the fear of getting tested, and somehow knew that I was positive. I was in Sydney for six months of residence at the university where I started a PhD program. It was toward the end of that stay and just before I was to return to Bangkok and to my Thai partner of over five years, that I made an appointment to get tested.

Clearly busy with his daily appointments, my diagnosing doctor took just enough time for me during that first session, talking with me as a counselor might, asking about my family's medical history and any difficult circumstances in our lives. Feeling at ease with him, I spoke about my mother having Huntington's disease and having been in a nursing home for seven years (she would die less than a year later). I talked about my own fears of having Huntington's, ever since finding out that Mom had it, back in 1975 when I was 15, and living with that dread for the 20 years since, then at 35, the age around which my mother and grandmother had started showing the symptoms. I told him about Laura, the second of my three younger sisters, murdered two-and-a-half years before, shot in the back of the head in a restaurant robbery, and how she and I had been so close, at the time the only person in my family I had told that I was gay.

The doctor no doubt said more than what I remember, but this is what stays with me: 'With all that you've been through, and with what I feel from you today', he said, 'I sense that you are a self-healer and that will be useful, whether you test positive or negative'. We moved from our chairs around his desk to an examining table, upon which I sat as he prepared the syringe. Watching as he inserted the needle in the vein of my arm, and seeing my blood flow into the vial, a wave of relief washed over me. The fear of getting tested disappeared instantly; no longer was I its prisoner, and soon there would be no uncertainty about my HIV status. That was my first lesson in what to do with fear, one I had to keep learning again and again as each of the next fears came into and left my life one after another.

A week later I returned to the doctor's office for the results. I was sitting in the reception area waiting for my appointment when the doctor came in to speak with the receptionist, saw me and from the look on his face and the way he greeted me, I knew that I was HIV-positive. When he actually told me a few minutes later, I am not sure today whether I was thinking about death, but I do remember a deeply subconscious refrain of 'you go to Sydney, you test positive, you die'. The remaining time with the doctor was spent discussing clinical details, numbers, a few further tests for any opportunistic infections, and how I might follow up these life-changing results once I got back to Thailand. I called my partner and told him and also a close friend at the international university where I worked, thinking that at least one person at my workplace should know.

When I got back to Bangkok, through another close friend, I found a doctor who treated HIV-positive people at his clinic and began a seven-year relationship with him in which I would go in every six...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1847692192
• ISBN 13: 9781847692191
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 298
• Herausgeber: Higgins Christina, Norton Bonny
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland