A Kaler
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 16566 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | A Kaler |
| NOMBRES | A |
| APELLIDO | Kaler |
| FIRMA | KALER A |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2681-3483 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 228 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Drivers and dimensions of economic abuse against women in rural Tanzania
It's a Matter of Institutional Trust
In a time of conflicting information, how does trust in institutions and their messages shape parents’ decisions around childhood vaccination? Using a mixed-methods approach with survey (N = 337 parents) and interview data (N = 23), this study explores seasonal vaccine uptake and hesitancy among parents in the Canadian province of Alberta since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that parental perceptions of vaccinations largely reflec…
Gathering Stories for Community Action
In October 2021, the International Autobiography Association Chapter of the Americas (IABAA) presented an online conference "Stories of Change, Stories for Change," co-hosted by IABAA and the Faculty of Arts Signature Area "Stories of Change" at the University of Alberta (Canada). The conference featured speakers from across the Americas on autobiographical storytelling. The plenary panel for the conference featured four scholars in North America…
God’s Story’ as ideological determinant in faith-based cosmopolitanism
In his 2017 book, David Hollinger argues that, historically, Protestant American missionaries acted like 'boomerangs' with the intent of changing their targeted populations through evangelism. In actuality, their work had a greater effect on the population from which they departed. This boomerang effect is the consequence of an alteration of values arising from mission work abroad that made missionaries more critical of racism, colonialism, and r…
Almost at Home in South Sudan
In this study, we examine the experience of international Christian humanitarian aid workers and who work in South Sudan. From interviews with thirty people in east Africa and north America, we derive a relationship between Christianity as our participants understand it, and their modalities of encountering “the other” – the people of South Sudan, who may seem different and unfamiliar, yet who must be met as part of religiously motivated life and…
Modernizing Sexuality
Talking about time
We investigate ways in which international evangelical Christian humanitarians talk about time as they engaged in humanitarian assistance and development work in South Sudan. Our focus on Christian development work is motivated by a desire to understand how and why people persevere in humanitarian work and reconcile seemingly impossible circumstances and to further elaborate sociological conceptions of time as experienced by people in their own l…
Baby Trouble in the Last Best West
Essentials of Field Relationships
Field research can consist of trekking across the globe to study peoples in exotic cultural settings. It can also mean strapping on your running shoes and observing behavior at the local market. Regardless of whether the researcher is “at home” or away, the development of research relationships is paramount to the success of the research project. In this book, the authors provide guidance to researchers on developing relationships in their field …
Gendered mobilities and food security
They are looking just the same
Food, Donors, and Dependency Syndrome(s) in South Sudan
This article investigates the deployment of dependency as a keyword in discussions of food security in South Sudan, on the basis of interviews and observations carried out in December 2012. Our initial intent was to estimate challenges to rural food security as the country emerged from decades of violent conflict. However, the notion of a “culture of dependency” arose persistently from our data, alongside more conventional information about food.…
Making meaning in the time of Aids
The Malawi Journals Project is one of the longest-running observational field studies in rural sub-Saharan Africa, ongoing since 1999. The journals provide real-time accounts of the unfolding epidemic, from the days when AIDS was considered by rural Malawians to be a death sentence, through the advent of international AIDS organisations bearing advice on avoiding infections by self-control, and then the turn to institutionally-based efforts to co…
Sexuality, identity and dissidence
In this review essay, I consider three recent monographs on sexuality and sexual cultures in Africa. Each of these three books grapple with the “problem orientation” of scholarship on African sexuality, in which sexuality is conceptualised primarily with reference to AIDS, homophobia and violence. The authors move beyond this problem orientation through a common concern investigating the poles of “modernity” vs “tradition”, “global” vs “local” an…
Revelations of HIV-infected patients treated with highly active antiretroviral therapy (Haart) in rural Uganda
The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the psychosocial changes revealed by persons living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in western Uganda as a result of the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). Fourteen participants were interviewed on two occasions. Two focus groups discussions were also conducted. Patients experienced important personal benefits as a result of HAART and the resulting clinical improvement. These b…
Popular Moralities and Institutional Rationalities in Malawi's Struggle Against Aids
The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is fertile ground for examining how moral evaluations evolve over time and across different settings. We compare the discourse on AIDS in Malawi as presented in the media with that of everyday conversations. Drawing on two sets of texts, newspaper articles and conversational journals, produced over a ten-year period from 1999 through 2008, we analyze their moral injunctions, or what individuals should or sh…
Bodies, Politics, and African Healing
Reviewed by: Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania by Stacey A. Langwick Amy Kaler Stacey A. Langwick. Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. xiii + 300 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Prologue. Epilogue. Glossary. Notes. References. Index. $70.00. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. Bodies, Politics and African Healing is an ambitious, intriguing book…
The more you learn the less you know? Interpretive ambiguity across three modes of qualitative data
BACKGROUND: Researchers across disciplines face a similar challenge ensuring our methods can give us valid, usable answers to our questions. But what happens when multiple strategies of inquiry give us different answers to the same research question? We explore this question through three different modes of qualitative inquiry--interviews, focus groups, and participant observation - oriented around local attitudes to HIV testing. OBJECTIVE: We in…
The National Gain is Nil”
This paper uses the concept of biopolitics to analyze the ways in which infant mortality was talked about in Alberta between the beginning of the first world war and the beginning of the second. Material is drawn primarily from small-town newspapers. Infant mortality is understood as a form of perverse reproduction, in which life and death are unnaturally juxtaposed, threatening the integrity of the emergent polity of Alberta. The two main tropes…
Sex, sexuality, and changing times in Africa
“Living by the hoe” in the age of treatment
This paper considers the effects of antiretroviral treatment on the households of person with AIDS in western Uganda. Interviews were carried out with 110 co-resident "treatment partners" of people receiving treatment. We discuss these family members' accounts of the impact of sickness, followed by treatment, on their household's livelihood, defined as the activities needed to obtain and process the resources required to sustain the households. T…
Gender differences in antiretroviral treatment outcomes of HIV patients in rural Uganda
Gender differences in treatment outcomes of 305 persons living with HIV receiving antiretroviral treatment (ART) in Kabarole district, western Uganda, were evaluated. The primary treatment outcome was virological suppression defined as HIV-1 RNA viral load (VL) 400 copies/ml) as compared to males (odds ratio 2.14, 95% confidence interval 0.99-4.63, p=0.05). While females had a significantly higher baseline CD4 cell count at initiation of treatmen…
Gender-as-Knowledge and Aids in Africa
Asking God about the date you will die
Testing for HIV is becoming more available in Africa. Global advocates of testing see it as key to AIDS prevention. However, testing is not always perceived as a good thing by people at risk. Here, we consider testing from the perspective of people in a high-prevalence community. Using qualitative data from rural Malawi, we show that the decision to test is not as straightforward as suggested in the testing advocacy literature, but is marked by u…
Health interventions and the persistence of rumour
Disobedient Distributors
The implementation of social welfare programs, including family planning programs, is strongly conditioned by the needs, desires, and agendas of those who carry them out, known as “street‐level bureaucrats.” In this study, the strategies of CBD agents in western Kenya are examined in order to understand how they use their job as a means to achieve their own personal goals. The concept of clientelism, borrowed from the field of political science, …
Many Divorces and Many Spinsters
In the author’s 1999 interviews, elders in a district of southern Malawi insisted that the marriages of their children and grandchildren are a weakened and degenerate form of the marriages of their own youth. However, data from the 1940s shows that identical beliefs about marriage were held even then. Marriage is thus constantly presented as an institution in crisis, deteriorating from an Arcadian form located in the ever-receding past. The autho…
Aids-talk in everyday life
Health interventions and the persistence of rumour
The Moral Lens of Population Control
The study presents an investigation of stories about condoms in southern Malawi. Malawians' concerns about coercive population control imposed by a national government or international cabal provide a moral lens through which condoms and other health promotions are viewed, with unknown but probably negative impact on the use of condoms. The focus of the study is on the long shadow cast by population control because it is underresearched and, in f…
My Girlfriends Could Fill A Yanu-Yanu Bus
In this paper, I investigate the ways that young men in rural southern Malawi talk about HIV and their own perceptions of risk. I relate these findings first to evolving gender relations in Malawi during the AIDS epidemic, and second to HIV prevention
Unreal Women
In this paper, I take up the lives of women with persistent vulvar pain for what they can reveal about the enmeshment of gender, (hetero)sexuality and bodily practices. Women with vulvodynia are unable to perform the central heterogendering act of penetrative intercourse with a male partner. They describe this inability as rendering them effectively 'genderless', described as being 'not a real woman' or a 'fake woman'. I analyse their perceptions…
It's some kind of women's empowerment
Asking God about the date you will die
Testing for HIV is becoming more available in Africa. Global advocates of testing see it as key to AIDS prevention. However, testing is not always perceived as a good thing by people at risk. Here, we consider testing from the perspective of people in a high-prevalence community. Using qualitative data from rural Malawi, we show that the decision to test is not as straightforward as suggested in the testing advocacy literature, but is marked by u…
Popular Moralities and Institutional Rationalities in Malawi's Struggle Against Aids
The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is fertile ground for examining how moral evaluations evolve over time and across different settings. We compare the discourse on AIDS in Malawi as presented in the media with that of everyday conversations. Drawing on two sets of texts, newspaper articles and conversational journals, produced over a ten-year period from 1999 through 2008, we analyze their moral injunctions, or what individuals should or sh…
When They See Money, They Think it's Life
In this article, I draw on archival documents and interviews with elderly Malawian men and women to elaborate a ‘philosophy of money’ very different from the mainstream classical view in social history. While social theorists in the classical Euro-American tradition have until now associated money with rationality, calculability and the draining of affect and emotion from daily life, Malawian elders looking back on the monetisation of their commu…
The more you learn the less you know? Interpretive ambiguity across three modes of qualitative data
BACKGROUND: Researchers across disciplines face a similar challenge ensuring our methods can give us valid, usable answers to our questions. But what happens when multiple strategies of inquiry give us different answers to the same research question? We explore this question through three different modes of qualitative inquiry--interviews, focus groups, and participant observation - oriented around local attitudes to HIV testing. OBJECTIVE: We in…
The Female Condom in North America
In this paper, I examine the selling of the female condom and the predominantly negative response it garnered in the North American media during the 1990s. I situate the female condom as a technology that emerged at the convergence of the twentieth century women’s health movement and the much more recent HIV-prevention movement, both of which stressed ideals of individual self-control and empowerment for women as the keys to sexual health. Howeve…
They are looking just the same
A threat to the nation and a threat to the men
In this paper, I discuss the prohibition of the injectible contraceptive Depo‐Provera in Zimbabwe in 1981 by analysing the confluence of events which led both to its popularity amongst Zimbabwean women and to the suspicion in which it was held by many Zimbabwean men. I argue that the prohibition of Depo‐Provera must be seen both as an act of nationalist self‐assertion by the newly victorious majority government under ZANU (PF) and also as a signi…
Talking about time
We investigate ways in which international evangelical Christian humanitarians talk about time as they engaged in humanitarian assistance and development work in South Sudan. Our focus on Christian development work is motivated by a desire to understand how and why people persevere in humanitarian work and reconcile seemingly impossible circumstances and to further elaborate sociological conceptions of time as experienced by people in their own l…
Gender-as-Knowledge and Aids in Africa
Visions of Domesticity in the African Women’s Homecraft Movement in Rhodesia
Now I want you to think and remember for a moment why these clubs were started for African women. The important part is to remember what we call the aims of the women’s clubs. It says this—to help and encourage all African women to become good homemakers and to work together in unity for the advancement of their people. Lady Tredgold, First Lady of Southern Rhodesia, in a speech opening the Congress of the Federation of African Women’s Clubs in M…
Almost at Home in South Sudan
In this study, we examine the experience of international Christian humanitarian aid workers and who work in South Sudan. From interviews with thirty people in east Africa and north America, we derive a relationship between Christianity as our participants understand it, and their modalities of encountering “the other” – the people of South Sudan, who may seem different and unfamiliar, yet who must be met as part of religiously motivated life and…
Gendered mobilities and food security
The National Gain is Nil”
This paper uses the concept of biopolitics to analyze the ways in which infant mortality was talked about in Alberta between the beginning of the first world war and the beginning of the second. Material is drawn primarily from small-town newspapers. Infant mortality is understood as a form of perverse reproduction, in which life and death are unnaturally juxtaposed, threatening the integrity of the emergent polity of Alberta. The two main tropes…
Classifying Pain
Maternal Identity and War in Mothers of the Revolution
In this paper, I investigate motherhood as it was constructed and practiced by Zimbabwean women in rural villages during the Zimbabwean war of liberation, through the analysis of a collection of thirty personal narratives of the war.' This war shook preexisting social and familial structures, presenting the women of the villages with the task of realigning their perceptions with the new social facts around them. I will concentrate on three interr…
A threat to the nation and a threat to the men
In this paper, I discuss the prohibition of the injectible contraceptive Depo‐Provera in Zimbabwe in 1981 by analysing the confluence of events which led both to its popularity amongst Zimbabwean women and to the suspicion in which it was held by many Zimbabwean men. I argue that the prohibition of Depo‐Provera must be seen both as an act of nationalist self‐assertion by the newly victorious majority government under ZANU (PF) and also as a signi…
Visions of Domesticity in the African Women’s Homecraft Movement in Rhodesia
Now I want you to think and remember for a moment why these clubs were started for African women. The important part is to remember what we call the aims of the women’s clubs. It says this—to help and encourage all African women to become good homemakers and to work together in unity for the advancement of their people. Lady Tredgold, First Lady of Southern Rhodesia, in a speech opening the Congress of the Federation of African Women’s Clubs in M…
"Who Has Told You to Do This Thing?" Toward a Feminist Interpretation of Contraceptive Diffusion in Rhodesia, 1970-1980
Disobedient Distributors
The implementation of social welfare programs, including family planning programs, is strongly conditioned by the needs, desires, and agendas of those who carry them out, known as “street‐level bureaucrats.” In this study, the strategies of CBD agents in western Kenya are examined in order to understand how they use their job as a means to achieve their own personal goals. The concept of clientelism, borrowed from the field of political science, …
Many Divorces and Many Spinsters
In the author’s 1999 interviews, elders in a district of southern Malawi insisted that the marriages of their children and grandchildren are a weakened and degenerate form of the marriages of their own youth. However, data from the 1940s shows that identical beliefs about marriage were held even then. Marriage is thus constantly presented as an institution in crisis, deteriorating from an Arcadian form located in the ever-receding past. The autho…
It's some kind of women's empowerment
My Girlfriends Could Fill A Yanu-Yanu Bus
In this paper, I investigate the ways that young men in rural southern Malawi talk about HIV and their own perceptions of risk. I relate these findings first to evolving gender relations in Malawi during the AIDS epidemic, and second to HIV prevention
The future of female‐controlled barrier methods for HIV prevention
In the context of HIV/AIDS, there is increasing interest in female controlled barrier methods. HIV prevention suffers from a critical 'technology gap': namely, the lack of products to enable women to reduce their own risk of sexually transmitted infection, independent of their male partners. An ideal technology should be low‐cost, free of side effects, effective against both HIV and other STIs, and undetectable by male sexual partners. A first ge…
The Moral Lens of Population Control
The study presents an investigation of stories about condoms in southern Malawi. Malawians' concerns about coercive population control imposed by a national government or international cabal provide a moral lens through which condoms and other health promotions are viewed, with unknown but probably negative impact on the use of condoms. The focus of the study is on the long shadow cast by population control because it is underresearched and, in f…
Aids-talk in everyday life
The Female Condom in North America
In this paper, I examine the selling of the female condom and the predominantly negative response it garnered in the North American media during the 1990s. I situate the female condom as a technology that emerged at the convergence of the twentieth century women’s health movement and the much more recent HIV-prevention movement, both of which stressed ideals of individual self-control and empowerment for women as the keys to sexual health. Howeve…
Classifying Pain
When They See Money, They Think it's Life
In this article, I draw on archival documents and interviews with elderly Malawian men and women to elaborate a ‘philosophy of money’ very different from the mainstream classical view in social history. While social theorists in the classical Euro-American tradition have until now associated money with rationality, calculability and the draining of affect and emotion from daily life, Malawian elders looking back on the monetisation of their commu…
Unreal Women
In this paper, I take up the lives of women with persistent vulvar pain for what they can reveal about the enmeshment of gender, (hetero)sexuality and bodily practices. Women with vulvodynia are unable to perform the central heterogendering act of penetrative intercourse with a male partner. They describe this inability as rendering them effectively 'genderless', described as being 'not a real woman' or a 'fake woman'. I analyse their perceptions…
Health interventions and the persistence of rumour
African Perspectives on Female Circumcision
(2009). African Perspectives on Female Circumcision. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des etudes africaines: Vol. 43, New Perspectives on Sexualities in Africa, pp. 178-183
“Living by the hoe” in the age of treatment
This paper considers the effects of antiretroviral treatment on the households of person with AIDS in western Uganda. Interviews were carried out with 110 co-resident "treatment partners" of people receiving treatment. We discuss these family members' accounts of the impact of sickness, followed by treatment, on their household's livelihood, defined as the activities needed to obtain and process the resources required to sustain the households. T…
Gender differences in antiretroviral treatment outcomes of HIV patients in rural Uganda
Gender differences in treatment outcomes of 305 persons living with HIV receiving antiretroviral treatment (ART) in Kabarole district, western Uganda, were evaluated. The primary treatment outcome was virological suppression defined as HIV-1 RNA viral load (VL) 400 copies/ml) as compared to males (odds ratio 2.14, 95% confidence interval 0.99-4.63, p=0.05). While females had a significantly higher baseline CD4 cell count at initiation of treatmen…
Gender-as-Knowledge and Aids in Africa
Asking God about the date you will die
Testing for HIV is becoming more available in Africa. Global advocates of testing see it as key to AIDS prevention. However, testing is not always perceived as a good thing by people at risk. Here, we consider testing from the perspective of people in a high-prevalence community. Using qualitative data from rural Malawi, we show that the decision to test is not as straightforward as suggested in the testing advocacy literature, but is marked by u…
The National Gain is Nil”
This paper uses the concept of biopolitics to analyze the ways in which infant mortality was talked about in Alberta between the beginning of the first world war and the beginning of the second. Material is drawn primarily from small-town newspapers. Infant mortality is understood as a form of perverse reproduction, in which life and death are unnaturally juxtaposed, threatening the integrity of the emergent polity of Alberta. The two main tropes…
Sex, sexuality, and changing times in Africa
Bodies, Politics, and African Healing
Reviewed by: Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania by Stacey A. Langwick Amy Kaler Stacey A. Langwick. Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. xiii + 300 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Prologue. Epilogue. Glossary. Notes. References. Index. $70.00. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. Bodies, Politics and African Healing is an ambitious, intriguing book…
The more you learn the less you know? Interpretive ambiguity across three modes of qualitative data
BACKGROUND: Researchers across disciplines face a similar challenge ensuring our methods can give us valid, usable answers to our questions. But what happens when multiple strategies of inquiry give us different answers to the same research question? We explore this question through three different modes of qualitative inquiry--interviews, focus groups, and participant observation - oriented around local attitudes to HIV testing. OBJECTIVE: We in…
Sociology (34 obras) · Political science (23 obras) · Gender Studies (20 obras) · Medicine (18 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (12 obras) · Gender Studies (12 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Economic growth (10 obras)