Presented by Prof. Catherine Burns
A new relationship is opening up between research on sexualities and gender, and the emerging field of medical humanities. In Southern Africa the HIV AIDS experience and epidemic gives this a particular form and shape. This presentation is a sketch of a kind of "Waiting Room" between spaces of thought, activism, the intersection of the humanities with biomedical and clinical research, policy making and scholarly imagination.
This presentation draws on scholarship about the African continent as being “in the waiting room of history", (politically, in class terms, institutionally, in terms of the demographic transition, together with expectations of sexual freedom, new gender relations, and the place of healing, medicine and clinical care). From the vantage point of the humanities I ask: is South Africa a waiting room itself? I start from the drama of the end of minority rule, move to the rise of current epidemics, to sexual violence and maternal health crises, to the specifics of TB and HIV medication and treatments, to activism and radicalism, and end with an analysis of the work of patience and the construction of the patient in South Africa today.
Prof. Catherine Burns
Catherine Burns worked at several universities in the USA, and at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where she was based from 1995-2009. Catherine joined the WITS Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in January 2012, bringing with her extensive cross disciplinary research in the fields of HIV, gender studies, sexual and medical history. She initiated a Mellon-funded Medical Humanities project at WITS, based at WISER, that now spans three Faculties. Catherine has taught in History, in Medicine and Public Health, and in Gender Studies, and has supervised many masters & doctoral students in African history; sociology; anthropology; politics; nursing; religious studies; development and gender studies and public health. She is the joint editor of the interdisciplinary journal African Studies.
Date: Tuesday, 21 June 2016
Time: 16h30 to 18h00
Venue: SRC Chamber, Conference Centre, Main Campus, University of Pretoria
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