Conceptualizing and assessing community-based HIV prevention work

In ‘Letting them die’: why HIV/AIDS prevention programmes fail, Catherine Campbell provides a tremendously valuable, detailed and sensitive case study, using it to ask questions that are crucial to making HIV prevention efforts productive and effective, which they have far too seldom been. She offers an insightful ethnographic look at the Summertown communitybased prevention project in South Africa, assessing the strengths and failures in its planning and implementation. Catherine Campbell, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics and the University of Natal, has used extensive interview data to appraise this project, to work beyond the journal-and-conference academic circuit and use the outcome of this initiative to strongly conceptualize future community-level interventions. Campbell considers what are the practical and motivational reasons that keep people from taking relatively simple measures to protect themselves from HIV infection even after they have been informed about transmission risks and have condoms available. Although there are many HIV prevention programs ongoing worldwide, almost none is effective enough to significantly affect a community’s future, and few do the sort of critical and fine self-assessment and inquiry that Campbell documents in this book. The insights she provides are crucial not only for improving future work done at Summertown but surely are important for efforts undertaken at other sites as well. Campbell deploys a multi-faceted analysis comprising Bourdieuvian notions of human and social capital and social reproduction

Ethnography · Political science · Psychological intervention · Public relations · Social capital · Social science · Sociology · Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health · Community Health and Development · HIV/AIDS Impact and Responses · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology

• Understanding the Role of Everyday Practices of Privilege in the Perpetuation of Inequalities

  Open Access•Christine Stephens, Annemarie Gillies•Journal of Community & Applied…•2011

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