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A book launch and panel discussion on the lives and work of artists, activists and academics engaged in the struggle for life-saving HIV treatment in and beyond South Africa.
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Elizabeth Mills, author of the new book HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine and former IDS PhD Student and Research Fellow. Dr Mills spoke with a panel of academics and activists from South Africa and the UK, to discuss the lessons from the global struggle for equitable access to life-saving HIV treatment. This included the value of art, resistance and transnational activism when holding global and national institutions accountable to the embodied wellbeing of citizens.
Each of the speakers have, for decades, been concerned with understanding the embodied ramifications of health inequalities around the world.
After providing an overview of HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine, we will hear from the panelists as they reflect on the book and on their own trajectory of work in academia, art and activism around gender, health and democracy.
About the book
HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine centers on the lives of women who live with HIV in South Africa and who have navigated a complex assemblage of affective relationships, activist networks, government institutions and global coalitions to transform international and national health policies that govern access to essential HIV medicines.
Drawing on 20 years of multi-sited ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, India and Brazil, the book foregrounds the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s embodied precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance.
This study of women’s activism to access HIV medicine is not simply a study of the evolution of global and national health policy but one that reveals the extent to which policy becomes embodied, recognizing that bodies too are never the same and experience intersecting inequalities in profoundly unique ways.
By focusing specifically on policies around access to HIV medicines at a national, transnational and global level, this book traces an important history – the struggle to access these medicines in the Global South – and brings this history into the present by articulating the lessons learnt by the activists and policy makers engaged in shaping these vital policies over the first two decades of the 21st century.
Speakers
- Elizabeth Mills, Senior Lecturer, Anthropology, Sussex University; CORTH Co-Director
- Hayley MacGregor, Professorial Research Fellow, IDS; CORTH Co-Director
- Nondumiso Hlwele, Artist, activist and member of the Bambanani Women’s Group, South Africa
- Maya Unnithan, Head of Anthropology, Sussex University; CORTH Director
- Lenore Manderson, Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
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