Investigating the HIV/AIDS Disparity with Cultural Geography and Public Health Methods

Scott Darius D, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Tonia Poteat at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist researching the cultural geography of rural HIV/AIDS disparities. Not enough is yet known about spatial and cultural identities in relation to health disparities beyond clinical descriptors. To address this issue, leading HIV/AIDS disparity researchers call for work that employs narrative and community-focused approaches. This project employs such approaches to consider the ways HIV/AIDS disparities are negotiated in communities. By focusing on narratives, this project investigates the contours and functions of rural communities related to health inequity. This project aims to provide critical insight into how oral histories contextualize and mobilize spatial knowledge of HIV/AIDS' impact on the community and social experiences in the United States. It uses (1) research review, (2) oral history interviewing, and (3) field observation. Research review involves weighing how previously published literature in the creative writing and humanistic studies offer narratives similar to oral history that relay personal and community responses to HIV/AIDS disparity. Such research review is designed to inform public health methodology and improve understandings of HIV/AIDS disparity in cultural terms. Fieldwork for the project involves collecting a series of oral history interviews and conducting field observations to weigh the pertinent potential of humanistic narratives as primary data. In particular, interviews focus on how the impact of HIV/AIDS from the 1980s to now has altered individual's relationships to their rural communities as well as the ways collective social environments have formed. This study will ultimately foster improved understandings of the social terrain of HIV disparity from the points-of-views of those affected by it in order to potentiate more catered, place-specific interventions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.