The Spelman College Women's Research and Resource Center is convening a global invitational conference focused on """"""""Women, Girls and HIV/AIDS in Africa and the African Diaspora."""""""" The conference examines the impact of the pandemic on Black women and girls in the United States and select countries in Africa and Latin America from a cross-disciplinary perspective that is informed by race, gender, culture and geographic Location. The conference's specific aim is to engage faculty and students at other historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), women's colleges and institutions of higher education worldwide in meaningful dialogue that will lead to long-term cross-disciplinary research partnerships and curriculum development initiatives. The target audience of 100 participants will include faculty/student teams from other U.S. institutions of higher education, community-based organizations, public policy officials, individuals, as well as five-member delegations from South Africa, Senegal, and Brazil. Plenary sessions, film showings, a selected field trip, and small group discussions during the course of the meeting will focus on topics such as environments that place girls at risk; stigma and discrimination; biotechnologies and reproductive health rights; culture-specific research application and adaptation; and male involvement, roles, responsibilities and strategies for change. At Spelman, the commissioned papers and broadly-disseminated Resource Guide that will result from the conference will provide the foundation for a new Women's Health Concentration that integrates classroom instruction with basic and applied research and community outreach. It is anticipated that the new concentration will expose under-represented groups to this field of study and help to produce a new generation of physicians, research scientists, public policy officials, scholars and health-care professionals who can work in multidisciplinary teams that employ a variety of research methodologies.
