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Title Illness Narratives Without the Illness: Biomedical HIV Prevention Narratives from East Africa.
Full text https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7xx2478z; https://escholarship.org/content/qt7xx2478z/qt7xx2478z.pdf
Date 2024
Author(s) Johnson-Peretz, Jason; Atwine, Fredrick; Kamya, Moses; Ayieko, James; Petersen, Maya; Havlir, Diane; Camlin, Carol
Abstract Illness narratives invite practitioners to understand how biomedical and traditional health information is incorporated, integrated, or otherwise internalized into a patients own sense of self and social identity. Such narratives also reveal cultural values, underlying patterns in society, and the overall life context of the narrator. Most illness narratives have been examined from the perspective of European-derived genres and literary theory, even though theorists from other parts of the globe have developed locally relevant literary theories. Further, illness narratives typically examine only the experience of illness through acute or chronic suffering (and potential recovery). The advent of biomedical disease prevention methods like post- and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PEP and PrEP) for HIV, which require daily pill consumption or regular injections, complicates the notion of an illness narrative by including illness prevention in narrative accounts. This paper has two aims. First, we aim to rectify the Eurocentrism of existing illness narrative theory by incorporating insights from African literary theorists; second, we complicate the category by examining prevention narratives as a subset of illness narratives. We do this by investigating several narratives of HIV prevention from informants enrolled in an HIV prevention trial in Kenya and Uganda in 2022.
Subject(s) East Africa; HIV; Illness narratives; Luo; Prevention; Swahili; Humans; HIV Infections; Narration; Kenya; Uganda; Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis; Male; Female
Publisher eScholarship, University of California
Type of publication article
Format application/pdf
Source Journal of bioethics, vol 45, iss 4
Rights public
Identifier qt7xx2478z; info:doi/10.1007/s10912-024-09862-0
Repository Berkeley - University of California
Added to C-A: 2024-12-09;09:30:32