Language and Social sciences Education

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Browsing Language and Social sciences Education by Author "Bwalya, Katongo"

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    Identity, citizenship and the teaching profession: theoretical insights in the study of Zambian teachers living with human immune-deficiency Virus (HIV).
    (Services for Science and Education, 2022-03-25) Mulubale, Sanny; Bwalya, Katongo; Mundando, Janet
    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 [1]. 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/AIDS burden in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is higher than available resources to deal with the pandemic effectively [2] while the number of people living with the virus and on ART in SSA countries, such as Zambia, remains high [3]. The above proposition in this paper is supported by three fundamental concepts which can be surmised as: governmentality and identity. These two 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 socio-political 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.
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    Teaching within the context of ‘therapeutic citizenship’: a study on HIV governmentality among Zambian teachers living with ART.
    (IRE Journals, 2023-05-12) Bwalya, Katongo; Mulubale, Sanny
    The concerns of HIV medicalization should not just be ‘normalised’ by clinical approaches. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which HIV governmentality as mediated through a ‘therapeutic citizenship’ status, among school teachers, especially those on antiretroviral treatment (ART), have an effect on their everyday and development in Zambia. Semi-structured interviews with 41 (20 females and 21 males) purposively sampled HIV positive teachers in Zambia aged between 25 – 55 were conducted in western and southern provinces. Transcripts were processed using NVivo Pro 12®, following an inductive thematic analytic methodology. Results indicate that though a treatable illness, HIV has both latent and visible varying effects based on locality, language, gender, age, career, health care provisions, policy and social strata. Findings show that HIV has strong effect on individual identity and collective affect through past experiences, present events and medico-social uncertainties; stigma is still high and a big problem hindering disclosure; treatment access and adaptation are hard for some people; anxieties and mental health issues/stigma are high but unattended as they are outside set diagnostic medical categories; knowledge and information is averagely low. The results further point to medical success which places the disease somewhere between a disappearing tragedy – with some continuing effects of that history – and a chronic treatable pandemic with ongoing political as well as socio-economic consequences. This paper reveals that while issues around living with the HIV change – life on ART involves a governmentality process due to unending treatment practices that have human development implications. In the conclusion and final proposition, this paper shows that HIV can seem like a disappearing disease yet the challenges for ART are more medico-social and psychological than physiological. Since antiretroviral drugs increase life longevity, research focus and policy interventions should now shift from quantity (span) to quality of life on ART.