From Private Matter to Politics: AIDS in Africa, a Moving Object
Type de matériel :
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On the conclusion of doctoral research on Aids in Africa (Cameroon), the continual crossing of disciplinary borders provides the opportunity of a retrospective examination of the question. This research, closely attached to political science, entailed long forays into sociology and anthropology. The reasons for these academic expeditions deserve to be investigated, as does the empirical experience that gives them their meaning and their justification. Questions on the epistemological aspect of this research can be summarised as: how can a public policy be studied through political science when there are no political-science studies on the question? In other words, how can we draw the benefit from politicological questions that anthropologists have been asking? The aim of this article is to show how this research has been constructed, developed as it was out of the question of “urban youth” in Cameroon in the face of Aids, towards a critical analysis of the public policy on the control of this pandemic over the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa: from the private matter to the political dimension. The paper begins with questions related to sexuality, implicated in the spread of the disease, to espouse political questioning on what the author terms “a discordant model of public policy”. The article aims to bring out the links between the theoretical choices and encounters, between a cross-disciplinary journey and the combining of circumstances which together have built a subject of research that is perpetually changing.
Réseaux sociaux