Springer Public Secrets and Private Sufferings in the South African AIDS Epidemic: 6 (Social Aspects of HIV, 6)

This book tells the story of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, and asks why, after more than three decades, it has not normalised. Despite considerable efforts to prevent infection, and ambitious targets set to end the epidemic by 2030, HIV infections are increasing among young women and treatment uptake and adherence have been uneven. Focusing on the years preceding and following treatment access, this book addresses why an end to AIDS may be misplaced optimism. By examining public discourses and private narratives about infection, illness and death, this work reveals the contradictions between the lived experiences of AIDS suffering on the one hand, and biomedical certainties on the other. Based on long-term ethnographic research in rural villages of the South African lowveld, and within HIV prevention interventions in South Africa more generally, this book offers an intimate perspective on the social and cultural responses to the epidemic. From the Back Cover This book  tells the story of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, and asks why, after more than three decades, it has not normalised. Despite considerable efforts to prevent infection, and ambitious targets set to end the epidemic by 2030, HIV infections are increasing among young women and treatment uptake and adherence have been uneven. Focusing on the years preceding and following treatment access, this book addresses why an end to AIDS may be misplaced optimism. By examining public discourses and private narratives about infection, illness and death,  this work reveals the contradictions between the lived experiences of AIDS suffering on the one hand, and biomedical certainties on the other. Based on long-term ethnographic research in rural villages of the South African lowveld, and within HIV prevention interventions in South Africa more generally, this book offers an intimate perspective on the social and cultural responses to the epidemic. About the Author Jonathan Stadler is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. An anthropologist with almost 20 years of research experience in rural and urban southern Africa, his research interests are epidemics and syndemics, social suffering, sexuality, biotechnologies, clinical trials, and the application of anthropological methods in medical research. Stadler has pursued these themes over the past two decades in several linked long term ethnographic studies in rural (Bushbuckridge) and urban settings (Mombasa, Orange Farm, Soweto, inner-city Johannesburg). He has worked on five large-scale international clinical trials for HIV prevention, and several smaller studies, of innovative biotechnologies. He is co-author of  Negotiating Pharmaceutical Uncertainty: Women’s Agency in a South African HIV Prevention Trial (2017 Vanderbilt University Press) and  Off-Label: AIDS Review 2012 (Centre for the Study of AIDS, University of Pretoria), and more than 40 peer reviewed articles.