Listening to the Particular through Action Research on HIV and AIDS

In my work researching and writing on HIV and AIDS in East Africa, I am profoundly grateful for the groundbreaking work of Circle theologians. They have not only contributed to HIV knowledge production, but have modeled and refined a theological method that gives epistemological priority to those who carry the greatest burdens of the HIV pandemic in Africa, namely women. As I prepared for my own year of fieldwork with HIV-positive women in Mwanza, Tanzania, the extensive research on HIV and AIDS published by the Circle helped lay the foundation for my research design and methodology. For that reason, here I focus particularly on the fourth paradigm shift that Sarojini Nadar and Isabel Phiri name, which is action research, as this is where I locate my own research on HIV and AIDS.¹

As Nadar and Phiri acknowledge, action research honors both intellectual and activist commitments. It is an excellent research methodology for academics (and others) seeking to understand the impact of HIV within particular communities. Action research names research participants as co-collaborators while creating space for mutual empowerment and transformation. As a white, Western feminist who has studied and done research in East Africa since 1998, I decided on a participatory action research model, a collaborative solution-building model where community “insiders” and “outsiders” design and complete the research together. Within the research design, a primary concern was to decenter myself as the authority by giving the research participants epistemological priority throughout the course of the project.

As Nadar and Phiri experienced, the participants in my study were very up-front about what they wanted from the research. In one of my first interviews, I asked one HIV-positive woman why marriage had become an HIV risk factor.² After I asked this question, she looked at me and said that since I was the researcher, it was my job to figure out the answer, and as soon as I did, come back and explain it to her. Yet in the end, the women revealed their own answers as I listened along.

Each week, as I met with twelve women living with HIV and AIDS, we talked about the things they saw as important. We talked about marriage and sex, men and women, stigma and medicine, and life and death. Even subjects I thought would be taboo were open for discussion once a safe space was created. It has been in these safe spaces that important stories and new resources for prevention and care emerged, as every so often, one woman would hear a story from another woman in the group and say, “That has happened to me too. I thought I was the only one.” Circle theologians emphasize the importance of creating safe spaces for women’s speech,³ yet researchers do not “create” these safe spaces—they are created together by the research participants.

Within the action-research model, the women designed weekly activities that allowed them to reflect on our conversations. Some weeks they left with a set of digital cameras to take pictures of “women’s work” and other weeks they wrote letters to their pastors or to young couples about to be married. Throughout our four months together, they wove together pieces of their stories in ways that allowed them to speak normatively about what Christian marriage should be.

Personal reflections on my year of research in Mwanza deeply resonate with Nadar and Phiri’s idea of “research as a missiological endeavor.” In pushing the boundaries of mission and in redefining mission in terms of social justice and transformation rather than conversion, Nadar and Phiri create space not only to name the postcolonial context we inhabit but also to disown any understanding of mission that robs people of agency. Too often people living with HIV and AIDS are seen as victims in need of saving, preferably by those from outside. The idea of research as transformation rather than conversion changes which wisdom is privileged in the research setting. As Nadar and Phiri note, the process of the research becomes as important (or...