Weckesser, Annalise

ANNALISE WECKESSER, then a student at the University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom, received a grant in April 2008, to aid research on ''Modalities of Care' and the AIDS Epidemic: An Ethnography of Mozambican and South African Households,' supervised by Dr. Gillian Lewando Hundt. What 'modalities of care' are arising in response to dramatically increasing numbers of children experiencing parental death due to AIDS and other catastrophic diseases (tuberculosis, malaria, etc.)? How are these patterns of caregiving gendered? How do material factors, such as access to food, health care and education, mediate children's and their significant caregivers' experiences? This project addresses these questions through a feminist ethnography of informal familial and formal community-based modes of care in Agincourt, a rural sub-district of South Africa. Journalistic, apolitical representations of the so-called 'AIDS orphan crisis' are challenged through an examination of children's and caregivers' experiential knowledge, situating their subjectivities within social, political and economic systems of inequality. Participant-observation was carried out with two non-profit organizations supporting 'orphans and vulnerable children'' (OVCs) and their caregivers from shared extended kin households. A range of participatory techniques (journals, photography projects, network maps) were carried out with children connected to these organizations. This research unites feminist and child-centred anthropology and contributes to new perspectives on kinship and relatedness. It examines how extended kin households are transformed, and children's active roles in this transformation, during times of catastrophic illness and social survival.