PROJECT KHULUMA

:USING SMS TALK TO TACKLE

HIV STIGMA AMONG SOUTH AFRICAN ADOLESCENTS

CHARLOTTE XIAOU WUKing’s College London

EGO-MEDIA• European Research Council funded,

5 year project• Examining impact of digital and

social media on self-presentation• Inter-disciplinary: life-writing,

cultural studies, digital & medical humanities, psychiatry, English, sociolinguistics

http://ego-media.org

PROJECT KHULUMA (“talk” in isiZulu)• Groups of 10 - 12 young people• Participants aged 10 – 19• Recruited through hospitals in

Cape Town and Pretoria• Groups last 3 months• Each group contains an adult

trained facilitator• Significant increase in perceived

social support and wellbeing

ADOLESCENTS & HIV• More than 2 million adolescents (10 – 19 years old) living with HIV• AIDS now the second most common cause of death among

adolescents globally, and the leading cause of death among adolescents in Africa• Over 15% of young women and 5% of young men aged 15 – 24 in

South Africa living with HIV• Worldwide, AIDS-related deaths among 10 – 19 year olds tripled

between 2000 – 2015; rose by 50% in this group between 2005 and 2012 compared to a 30% decline seen in the general population

HIV in SOUTH AFRICA: SOME BACKGROUND

1982: First case of AIDS detected in South Africa

1985: First AIDS related death

1993: National Health Department announces that number of reported HIV infections increased by 60% since 1991

1994: First ANC government elected; End of apartheid regime

1995: Treatment Action Campaign founded

2000: President Thabo Mbeki suggests that HOV does not cause AIDS at International AIDS Conference in Durban

2003: Government finally approves plan to make ART available (from 2004)

2011: Government announces all people with CD4 count of 350 will have ART

Estimated 5.8 million people living with HIV in South Africa (2014)

Public health education programmes have traditionally relied on two modes of outreach: “media (radio, television, movies, billboards, etc.) and direct personal communication (discussion groups, individual counselling, etc.)” (Drescher 2010)

SOUTH AFRICA ONLINE / DIGITAL DIVISIONS“Many – including national policymakers – see the digital world as the key to Africa’s renaissance, an opportunity to leapfrog the barriers of underdevelopment and claim a place in a post-industrial information economy. But in other respects, the Internet seems a repetition of a familiar economy, with a handful of international service providers setting up subsidiaries in South Africa … in Howard Rheingold’s (1993) term, ‘homesteaders’ of an ‘electronic frontier’.”

- Martin Hall (2000), ‘Digital SA’

MENTAL HEALTH AND SMS / ONLINE TALKSTIGMA AND SHAME• Kemeny et al 2004: “threats to social

status are directly relevant to survival and reproduction”• Sensitivity to negative social

evaluation linked to faster immunological declines & poorer outcomes from HAART• “an integrated set of psychobiological

processes is initiated”

LANGUAGE AND CMC• Turn in narrative studies towards

smaller, less ‘grand’ units of communication cf. conversation analysis• Georgokopolou 2007: Small Stories,

Interaction and Identities: everyday interactional situations as crucial sites of subjectivity and self-fashioning

Thank you for listening