Eh!woza: intersection of art and science to engage youth on tuberculosis (original) (raw)
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Beyond the lab: Eh!woza and knowing tuberculosis
Medical Humanities
Eh!woza is a public engagement initiative that explores the biomedical and social aspects of tuberculosis (TB) in South Africa. The project is a collaboration between scientists based in an infectious disease research institute, a local conceptual/visual artist, a youth-based educational non-governmental organization (NGO) and young learners from a high-burden TB community. The learners participate in a series of interactive science and media production workshops: initially presented with biomedical knowledge about TB and, in later sessions, are trained in creating documentary films and engage with ideas around visual representation. The participants are encouraged to make use of this newly acquired knowledge to tell stories from their chosen communities in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town. Through its engagement with the complex manner in which TB is experienced, framed and understood by biomedical scientists, young people, and those who have been affected by the disease, Eh!wo...
Challenges in Exploratory Methods for Tuberculosis Research in South Africa
Haunted by a legacy of apartheid governance that left millions in material poverty, South Africa has among the highest tuberculosis (TB) morbidity and mortality rates in the world. Our Social Markers of TB research project shared a vision of working with ethnographic research methods to understand TB-infected persons, their families, care providers, and social networks. We argue that felt and enacted TB stigma and the related HIV-TB stigma impaired our ability to collect the necessary data for full portrait of TB-infected persons and their lived conditions. To circumvent this limitation, each researcher improvised and augmented conventional anthropological methods with more creative, directed, and at times destabilizing methods. We present three case studies as useful illustrations of the complexities and challenges we encountered in our attempts to conduct ethically sound TB research. We discuss the implications of our call for “improvisation” for the politics of research and ethical oversight.
2011
for funding this research. The deepest respect and gratitude goes to those who participated in this project: thank you for sharing your time, thoughts and sometimes deep personal pain with me. I am very grateful for the ongoing guidance, support, (and unwavering patience through the writing process) from my advisor, Dr. Helen Macdonald, who has carefully and thoughtfully cultivated this research interest. She never failed to show me new entry points and intellectual tools which enriched my work immensely. Thandi, sisi wam: Enkosi and Ndiyabulela kakhulu for your work ethic and budding interest in anthropology. I hope you enjoyed our time in the field. To all in Thandi's family: thank you for your relentless hospitality, a ‗home base', and endless cups of tea, Ndiyabulela. To Patrick Madden: my editor, thank you for your patience, sense of humour and critical feedback. My writing will never be the same and I found you just in time! To the Abney clan: thank you for patience and space when I had to write during the holidays, and thanks for the continued support from across the puddle. To Laura Winterton: thank you for the comic relief, open ears and sensitive insight. Lastly to Pet'a Mach: Thanks for the big things, the small things, and everything in between.
2014
Support and encourage current research through its disbursement of funds through the block grant process Enable senior academics to display academic leadership in advancing work in their discipline and in mentoring more junior colleagues Foster the next generation of scholars through postdoctoral fellowships and doctoral scholarships (renewable for three years) Reward and incentivise good scholarship 5 A rated 27B rated 79 NRF-rated researchers 193 Accredited journal units (Units are assigned to accredited research outputs and translate into a total monetary value) 80 th 52 nd The 2014-15 Times Higher Education World University Rankings places UCT at 80th for arts and humanities and 52nd for social sciences DOCTORAL GRADUATIONS K.C. ABNEY (SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY) At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa
Health Promotion International, 2022
Summary This paper presents empirical and methodological findings from an art-based, participatory process with a group (n = 16) of adolescent and young advisors in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. In a weekend workshop, participants reflected on their participation in 12 years of health and development-related research through theatre, song, visual methodologies and semi-structured interviews. Empirical findings suggest that participants interpreted the group research encounter as a site of empowerment, social support and as a socio-political endeavour. Through song, theatre and a mural illustration, they demonstrated that they value ‘unity’ in research, with the aim of ameliorating the conditions of adolescents and young people in other parts of South Africa and the continent. Methodological findings document how participants deployed art-based approaches from South Africa’s powerful history of activism, including the struggle against apartheid, the fight for anti-retrov...
Engaging adolescents in tuberculosis and clinical trial research through drama
Trials, 2016
Background: The South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative is based in Worcester where tuberculosis (TB) is endemic, and incidence rates are amongst the highest nationally. In high TB burden settings after an early childhood peak, incidence rates start to rise again in adolescents, therefore they are an important target group for tuberculosis vaccine research. In 2012, learners from a local school developed a one-off theatrical production out of an educational comic book Carina's Choice, developed by the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative in 2010. A Wellcome Trust International Engagement grant allowed for this one-off production to be further developed, with input from university students and staff, and rolled out to schools in the Worcester area as an engagement and education intervention. Methods: Focus group feedback was used to identify key messages and to develop the play's script. Qualitative methods were used to collect and analyse relevant data. Interviews were conducted with learner-actors, pre-and post-focus group feedback was obtained from a sample of school-going adolescents, and pre-and post-questionnaires were administered to adolescent audience members. Results: From the pre-drama focus group discussions, topics such as TB symptoms, stigma and transmission were identified as areas that needed attention. After the performances, adolescents showed improved knowledge on the identified topics and they discussed TB prevention measures. They highlighted transmission of TB during pregnancy as a further topic to be addressed in future iterations of the drama. Although stigma is a difficult phenomenon to interpret, post-drama participants understood that TB transmission could occur in all individuals. Learner-actors agreed with focus group participants that the play could impact the wider community if it were rolled out. Feedback from the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative staff verified that recruitment for an upcoming trial was facilitated by the preparedness that the play provided in recruitment areas. The study showed that before and after evaluations provide data on the usefulness of the play as an education tool. Conclusions: Theatre, presented and motivated by adolescent peers, can raise awareness of TB, and assist clinical trial preparedness and further engagement between trial staff and their trial community.
The burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) including hypertension, diabetes, and cancer, is rising in Sub-Saharan Africa countries like Tanzania and Malawi. This increase reflects complex interactions between diverse social, environmental, biological, and political factors. To intervene successfully, new approaches are therefore needed to understand how local knowledges and attitudes towards common NCDs influence health behaviours. This study compares the utility of using a novel arts-based participatory method and more traditional focus groups to generate new understandings of local knowledges, attitudes and behaviours towards NCDs and their risk factors. Single-gender arts-based participatory workshops and focus group discussions were conducted with local communities in Tanzania and Malawi. Thematic analysis compared workshop and focus group transcripts for depth of content and researcher-participant hierarchies. In addition, semiotic analysis examined the contribution of photo...
Beyond the Pandemic: Art-making lessons for SOTL in an unequal South African context
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South
This article aims to present an arts-based campaign as a strategy to glimpse into ‘the fault lines of inequality of access’ through the voices of art students and considers hope and imagination as strategies to engage with and move through the despair and trauma emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic period. The Lockdown Collection (TLC), established at the start of the first hard lockdown in March 2020, is considered, a case study for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South (SOTL). It reveals greater understanding of ways that visual research pedagogies can develop collective strategies for the individual and community to flourish in the face of the pandemic. Such strategies include the capacities to listen to student voices and raise funds for vulnerable artists. Artists find resilience in their ability to make a difference through their own agency to remake and transform internal and external realities through their artwork and imagine different possibilities. The co...
The two cultures debate has long gone stale. Art in Global Health has provoked us to think further about the interplay between artistic and scientific practice and the broader relationships in varied and unique contexts in biomedical research as it strives to discover solutions to very real global health challenges. Art in Global Health was a £400,000 project to support the creation of art works that explore, in surprising and insightful ways, how global health research is conducted and how its findings are used. Residencies were established with the five Wellcome Trust major overseas biomedical research programmes (Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam) http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/Funding/International/Major-Overseas-Programmes/ and with the Sanger Institute in the UK. It was specifically stated that the aim was neither to “sell" a particular research project, nor to anatomise it. Rather, the project aimed to investigate a series of particular local scientific projects across the various sites, and to build up a comparative impression of global health research, both in terms of the process of research itself and its place in local and global society. The ‘Art in Global Health’ project has been declared ground breaking, brave and inspiring by artists, research programmes and audiences alike. In light of this success, this document presents some insights and recommendations were the Wellcome Trust or other interested parties to conduct artist residency projects such as this in the future. The focus of this report is on the work of the overseas programmes where both the research and the art works could be called ‘socially engaged’.
2014
This dissertation is a study of the social, scientific, political and rhetorical origins of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) and the ability of a technical medical term, in concert with local clinical and government responses, to influence global biomedical action. XDR-TB, a form of tuberculosis that is resistant to most anti-tuberculosis drugs, was first creatively named and defined in 2005 in the context of a global laboratory survey documenting increasing tuberculosis drug resistance patterns around the world. In 2006, XDR-TB attracted international attention after a deadly cluster of drug-resistant tuberculosis was discovered in the rural South African town of Tugela Ferry, KwaZulu-Natal. International media and global health workers, responding to this news, defined XDR-TB as a critical threat to global health emanating from Southern Africa. As this dissertation shows, the association of XDR-TB with South Africa shaped the global response to XDR-TB, tying it closely to HIV/AIDS and linking it to the well-known history of South African AIDS denialism and public health inaction. The careful scrutiny given to South African XDR-TB by global public health experts profoundly impacted South African government responses to XDR-TB at the national, provincial, and regional levels. This detailed, multifaceted case study of global health knowledge in-the-making is based on nearly two years of fieldwork in South African clinical and community settings and interviews with international and South African tuberculosis researchers, policy makers, clinicians, administrators and patients. Widely circulated representations of XDR-TB are juxtaposed with the personal experience of South African nurses and local government administrators to make the case that responsibility for and control of successful global health interventions is more broadly distributed than common conceptions of global health research imply. In addition, this research uses published documents, unpublished policy literature, and promotional materials to trace how medical, public, and political understandings of XDR-TB in South Africa changed over time and across geographical space. This research changes our understanding of the politics and practices of health vi graduate student to first class lecturer and it has always been a great privilege to be her junior colleague. I plan to emulate her teaching style. Over the years I have had fascinating conversations with Susan Lindee about global health research, ethics, social responsibility and careers, and she provided me with critical insights for one of my grant proposals. She was also the teacher of my year's gateway introductory survey class into the History and Sociology of Science. As such she had a formative influence on my entire cohort-including Meggie Crnic and Jason Schwartz. Them I thank for being friends and colleagues through times of exhilaration as well as stress. We took a strange pride in the fact that all three of our last names translate to "black." The gradate students past and present in the History and Sociology of Science (and elsewhere) who have provided good company, new insights, and opportunities for commiseration over the years include (though this is not an exhaustive list