Ethnographic and Qualitative Research and Training for Social Change
Cars are zooming up and down Sandile Thusi as I take my morning walk along Currie Road. I wait patiently to cross over from Essenwood to Morningside. When I finally get a break, I run across and walk to Montpelier Road. I turn left and head up toward Jameson and Mitchel Parks. The street names More …
The air is pleasant, warm with a light ocean breeze as I set out on my morning walk along Currie Road toward the intersection at Sandile Thusi. Everywhere there is lush, deep green, tropical growth. Bright purple and pink flowers of the Tibouchina Grandiflora sway in the morning breeze. The homes are sequestered behind high More …
Dawn in Durban I am a recent returnee. My American husband and I bought a flat in Essenwood, Durban, during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am relishing living in my hometown after thirty plus years living in the United States. I have spent these years travelling between the two places conducting research and visiting my family More …
During the transition to democracy in 1993/4 I was visiting home in Durban, South Africa conducting ethnographic research on the intersections of gender, race, and class. Living in Los Angeles gave me the distance and space to reflect upon my experiences as a white woman growing up in a racially segregated state. As a member More …
Huddled together on a breezy winter’s day, a small gathering of family and friends stood in silence as the minister read from the bible at the graveside of Siha Zama. Elizabeth Ann, head bowed, looked frail in a black dress that hung limply on her small, wiry frame. She was thinking about Siha’s slow, shameful More …
The current COVID-19 health care crisis is reminiscent of the challenges African countries faced when HIV treatment was slow to become affordable and available in hardest-hit African countries. The world has once again been slow to ensure that Africans have equal access to lifesaving treatment and care. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the world More …
I recently gave a talk on reproductive justice and HIV sharing the lessons I have learned from my research in Southern and Eastern Africa. I became passionate about this work after meeting and talking with men and women in support groups for people living with HIV in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. People I talked with were More …
“Addressing the needs of the poor is built upon the insistence to not avert your gaze from suffering.” I was struck by these words uttered by Dr. Jim Yong Kim in a webinar on global health and social justice on October 20, 2020. Tabitha Johnson, director of the Sundance Foundation was speaking with Partners in More …
I first met Nomsa on July 28, 2007 during a research trip. I was visiting with an HIV support group in a rural community on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, when I noticed a frail looking, wizened woman sitting on the ground in front of the home where they met. Nomsa wore a faded More …
“It is staggering to think that we could lose so much so fast, that so many lives, all that effort, all those billions of dollars that got us this far could be lost. We cannot let that happen.” Peter Sands, Global Fund Executive Director. While we are all doing our best to adjust to the More …
UNAIDS, There is life after HIV, there is love. 8 March 2019. https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2019/march/20190308_life-after-hiv More …
I stopped dead in my tracks when my partner showed me an NPR article entitled “Don’t Nag Your Husband During Lockdown” (NPR April 2020). The Malaysian government COVID-19 related public campaign was also advising women to wear make-up and office clothes while working from home so as not to offend their husbands. On March 18, More …
If you, like me, are someone who conducts work on sexual or reproductive health there is no way that you can ignore sexual violence issues. Having conducted qualitative research on HIV and reproductive health for over a decade, I have heard many stories of women’s experiences and their fears of gender-based violence. I’ll never forget More …
As an anthropologist I am always in the business of gathering stories. And, as I have noted in an earlier post (The Danger of a Single Story), this often entails gathering multiple perspectives from people in different social positions in order to understand the full scope of an issue. In the mid-1990s I embarked on More …
As an anthropologist I am always learning from others, looking for new ways to understand other cultures and groups, and new approaches to engage in making social change. Recently, a student drew my attention to the work of Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia on cultural humility vs cultural competence. I find the concept of cultural More …
Anthropologists use a holistic approach to understand how social and cultural context shapes what is happening on the ground. As an anthropologist, I am committed to listening to and working with communities, vulnerable and marginalized groups, institutions, and organizations. More …
When I first watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, I was drawn in to her discourse on the way in which Africa and Africans are usually negatively portrayed in the media and imagined by people outside the continent. As a South African living in the United States, I identified with her lament that these negative stories overlook the many other stories that reflect people’s actual lived experiences. More …