African Women and HIV/AIDS: Gendered Experiences in Senegal, South Africa, and Immigrant African Communities in Philadelphia

Wednesday, March 24, 2004
11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building

Get a PDF version of the flyer.

A seed grant from the Rutgers Research Council jointly awarded to the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and the Institute for Research on Women spurred a consideration of African women's experiences with HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence.  The organizers gratefully acknowledge support from the Rutgers Research Council and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers and from the co-sponsoring entities: the Departments of Africana Studies and Anthropology, the Center for African Studies, and the Center for Women's Global Leadership.

Featured Speakers

Bernedette Muthien, Founder and Executive Director, Engender, South Africa
Muthien is the author of "Strategic Interventions: Intersections between Gender-Based Violence and HIV/AIDS" and "When Rights are Wronged: Gender-Based Violence and Human Rights in Africa." A participant in the 1999 Women's Global Leadership Institute hosted by the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers, Muthien's professional life has echoed the belief that the personal is political, and the global local, and hence her work has consistently centered on the issues of gender, human rights, and peace. Engender, a South African NGO, provides research and capacity building on genders and sexualities, human rights, justice, and peace to promote equity and social change.

Ellen E. Foley, Health and Societies Program, University of Pennsylvania
Foley is the author of "No Money, No Care: Women and Health Care Reform in Senegal" (Urban Anthropology, Studies of Cultural Systems & World Economic Development, 30:1, 2001) and an article in progress entitled "Negotiating Fertility and Reproduction: Women at the Crossroads of Islam, Development, and Wolof Culture in Senegal." Her dissertation, "In Sickness and in Health: Responding to Disease and Promoting Health in Senegal," addresses the impact of privatization and decentralization of the public health sector on rural and urban women's health with a particular focus on women's health knowledge as shaped by biomedicine, Islam, and local knowledge traditions. In addition to gender, power, and health issues in Senegal, her work focuses on health and social issues of African immigrant women in Philadelphia.

Julie Livingston, History, Rutgers University, moderator
Livingston is the author of "Pregnant Children and Half-Dead Adults: Modern Living and the Quickening Life-Cycle in Botswana" (Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 77:1, 2003) and "Reconfiguring Old Age: Elderly Women and Concerns Over Care in Southeastern Botswana" (Medical Anthropology, 22:2, 2003). Her work focuses on issues of health, healing, and the human body, while exploring questions about disability and able-bodiedness, gender and aging, the history of international health and development, and African medicine and nursing care.

The colloquium was planned in conjunction with Douglass College's conference Women in the Era of Globalization: Power and Gender on March 25, 2004, which includes the L'Hommedieu lecture by Mary Robinson (Director, Ethical Globalization Institute; former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1997-2002), and a panel moderated by Joanna Regulska and featuring Bernedette Muthien with other guests.