"During South Africa's period of transition from apartheid to capitalist democracy, it was seized by an epidemic of unparalleled proportions, propelling the new developmental state immediately into a "state of emergency." While most of the South Africans infected with HIV/AIDS are living in abject poverty and hold culturally hybrid beliefs about health and healing, the post-apartheid state and international health agencies ignore both of these social facts in constructing and implementing treatment and prevention campaigns. This project analyzes the factors that account for the disjuncture that has emerged between international and national policies on HIV/AIDS and the practices and beliefs of South Africans most impacted by the disease. As this project reveals, HIV/AIDS forces us to confront and negotiate the contradictory logics of redistribution and recognition.

Drawing on 27 months of ethnographic field research conducted in informal settlements and former townships on the outskirts of Johannesburg, this project focuses on: the political economy of the post-apartheid health system, the symbolic struggle over the signification of HIV/AIDS in the public sphere, and the ways in which communities impacted by the epidemic navigate structural inequality as well as multiple ideologies of health, gender, race and sexuality.

This project explores the root causes of health inequality by combining an ethnography situated within communities ravaged by the dual pandemics of poverty and HIV/AIDS with a political-economic analysis of health care in the global south. It situates peoples' understandings of and experiences with the disease within an analysis of developmental state policy, neo-liberal economics, and international policy interventions. In this way, the project links large-scale structures with communities' lived experiences. Analyzing the AIDS pandemic with this particular mixture of macro-sociology and ethnography is essential given the way in which patterns of HIV infection lay bare long histories of structural inequality and oppression.

Combining theoretical insights gained from political economy, cultural sociology, medical sociology, and post-colonial studies, this project engages in theoretical debates situated at the intersection of these sociological fields: sovereignty and the developmental state, the political economy of health care, and the politics of knowledge production in the post-colonial context. "