"Sick of AIDS": South African Youth Cultures, Communication and Sexuality
Claudia Mitchell and Ann Smith
DESCRIPTION
This study examines the interplay, real and potential, of three distinct youth focused communication communities in South Africa which, in one way or another, address youth sexuality:
- Those working in the area of Entertainment-Education (E-E) as an approach to marketing health through popular media.
- Those involved in studying mainstream popular/ youth culture (ranging from Diesel ads to Kwaito music).
- Those practitioners and academics involved with youth literature (novels, plays written specifically for adolescents).
The youth in South Africa is the most vulnerable populations in terms of HIV/AIDS infection rates. The overall objective of this study is to explore how to understand emerging adolescent sexuality in the context of illness and death, or conversely, how to understand illness in the context of health, sexuality and culture.
OBJECTIVES
- To support a critical analysis of youth culture texts in South Africa.
- To cultivate and ‘engineer’ debates, dialogues and discussions between and among the various individuals and groups working in the area of youth culture and in relation to the various youth-focused AIDS texts.
- To contribute to the creating a new space within communication communities in South Africa that places youth, AIDS, and survival at the center of social change.
METHODOLOGY
The study will be implemented involving the following steps:
- To identify key campaigns and popular texts related to HIV/AIDS and adolescent sexuality, and to conduct close readings both of the texts themselves, as well as the review literature surrounding them
- To conduct in-depth interviews with the key change agents within each of the groups, building on the work on youth literatures in the previous SSHRC study
- To set up linkages and networks between and amongst members of the three groups in South Africa.
This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada/Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada.