South Africa has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world while still suffering from the legacy of apartheid. The pandemic puts a further stress on existing rural labor constraints caused by male urban migration. Concurrently, environmentalists have raised concerns about the deepening reliance on the harvest of wild natural resources as a result of HIV/AIDS. A political ecology of disease is therefore fitting to explore how rural women and girls cope with labor constraints within the context of wild resource harvesting. The problem is that of a silenced group of users dependent upon open access natural resources of little national interest while suffering from an epidemic that the community prefers not to speak of. The research will therefore investigate rural women's and children's environmental spatial behaviors while coping with the household impact of HIV/AIDS in the former homeland Transkei. The objectives are to: 1) model the varying spatial distribution of wild harvesting among women and girls to compare individuals from HIV/AIDS afflicted households with non-afflicted households 2) and understand the contextual political ecology of disease that condition individual and household spatiotemporal allocation of wild harvesting in a context of rural poverty and poor health. The project hypothesizes that the labor constraints caused by the pandemic will influence individuals' spatial mobility as determined by the overall activity space of wild resource activities. Consequently, the proposed work will look at the issue of mobility on an individual and household level as an important asset and adaptation in rural natural resource-dependent livelihood strategies. Using a mixed methods approach to integrate geospatial tools with political ecology, there will be analyses of GPS-derived self-mapped daily trajectories, participatory ethnomapping with GPS, as well as contextual semi-structured interviews and socio-economic survey data. Such an integrated grounded analysis can help develop a framework of local micro-agency and to theorize about women's and girls' behavioral coping strategies and responses to the pandemic as they relate to wild harvesting.
Wild harvesting by women and children is an integral part of the diversified rural livelihood system in South Africa's HIV/AIDS affected communal lands. Yet the varying harvesters' conditioning factors and subsequent finer-scaled distributions of such harvesting are not well represented in the literature. Past research has focused on the demographic impact of the epidemic as it relates to natural resource use while there is scant attention paid to subsequent possible varying spatial distribution of dynamic wild resource use. The proposed research will present the first spatial micro-geography investigation of such daily environmental behaviors of women and girls living with HIV/AIDS within a macro-political ecology straddling the urban-rural divide. Because this epidemic is a multi-dimensional shock it is only through such an integrated approach that one can come to better understand its magnitude and complexity. This study will contribute to the literature on wild harvesting extraction in Africa generally while specifically addressing the need to understand women's and girls' spatial environmental behavior in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. An understanding of how the pandemic influences individuals in their extraction of fragile natural resources is also needed to guide future integrated policy interventions for poverty alleviation and sustainable natural resource management. Any lessons learned here can be applied not only to other HIV/AIDS afflicted regions in Africa but also to more general public health studies in other parts of the world. The proposed research will also train local previously disadvantaged African students in GIS as well as a number of research methods. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career. This project is jointly supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program and the Office of International Science and Engineering.
