Therapeutic citizenship and the teaching profession: new theoretical approaches of Zambian teachers living with human immuno deficiency virus (HIV) and on antiretroviral therapy (ART).
Date
2020-05
Authors
Mulubale, S.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
M alcolm Moffat Multidisciplinary Journal of Research and Education
Abstract
Teacher training, teachers’ economic status, their use of effective
pedagogy and many other factors have been chronicled extensively
by various scholars across disciplines in research on education in
developing countries. However, teachers’ experiences of illness and
health conditions as key actors in implementing the development agenda
of many countries in Africa, have received very limited attention. The HIV
and AIDS burden in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is higher than available
resources to deal with the pandemic effectively (Kharsany et al., 2016)
while the number of people living with the virus and on ART in SSA
countries, such as Zambia, remains high (UNAIDS, 2017). This article
discusses HIV positive teachers’ medicalisation in the Zambian context.
It makes a theoretical appraisal of the dynamics of health in this HIV
treatment era, viewing the era as leaving the AIDS pandemic between
two streams: a disappearing tragedy and a treatable illness with latent
psychological, social and economic effects (Lichtenstein, 2015:858).
The above proposition in this paper is supported by three fundamental
concepts which can be summarised as: governmentality, identity and
chronicity. These three concepts, when effectively synthesised, offer new
ways of understanding the medical solutions, normalcy, and their limits in
the everyday living of teachers who are on ART. Based on this theoretical
analysis and its relation to existing empirical data, the central argument
in the paper is that teachers’ daily lives seem to be filled with the sociopolitical
and economic consequences of HIV medicalisation and that
these consequences seem to shape and limit how teachers manage and
make sense of their acquired ‘therapeutic citizenship’ status.
Description
Keywords
Identity. , Chronicity. , Governmentality. , Teachers. , Therapeutic citizenship. , HIV. , Development.