Charles Bosk Catherine va de Ruit Mayer University of Pennsylvania
This research is on the discordance between perceptions of AIDS orphans held by international and national bureaucracies charged with developing and implementing AIDS-orphan policies and the local actors responsible for caring for AIDS-orphans. International humanitarian research and policy define an AIDS orphan in terms of the nuclear family, as a child who has lost at least one parent. In contrast, kin who are providing care reject the official definition of orphan because it is inconsistent with their kinship systems, where orphans are absorbed into the wider familial network. The study seeks to examine the repercussions of official classification systems on everyday social practices. This dissertation advances four research aims : 1) To analyze the processes by which official classification of the category orphan has been institutionalized into policy; 2) Understand how the legal category of "orphan," influenced by racial and gendered assumptions of the family under apartheid, continue to shape policy debates over orphans in the post apartheid era; 3) Study how kin and other local groups caring for orphans negotiate, contest and/or acquiesce to national and international policy prescriptions; 4) Examine the mechanisms by which policy actors are able to incorporate local practices into orphan policy. The study employs a multi-sited, mixed method research design. Qualitative interviews with policy-makers and implementers, ethnographic observation in two local settings in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, content analysis of policy documents, and historical research of the orphan policy under apartheid, will form the evidentiary basis of this study. This project is informed by preliminary qualitative research in 2004, based in KwaZulu-Natal, where the researcher observed a great deal of discomfort on the part of orphan caregivers to the term "orphan." This observation raised questions about the ways that local actors negotiate orphan policy. A pilot study was conducted in South Africa in October 2006, where national policy debates on orphan policy were studied. The pilot provided convincing evidence of the need to conduct empirical research of the objects of debate, kin caring for orphans in local communities, and to learn how these debates are resolved in practice.
Broader impact
The AIDS crisis is creating a massive orphan problem to which extensive resources are being directed. In this high-priority, high-stakes policy environment the research will contribute to building effective policy by examining local practices and the unintended consequences of orphan policy that may not be obvious to planners lacking a close connection to local contexts. The researcher will develop a social policy-teaching curriculum that will challenge students to consider the ways in which official classifications, designed to support disadvantaged groups, may in fact reproduce inequality by creating distinctions between individuals and groups.
