David Turkon, assistant professor of anthropology, organized and presented at a presidential session for the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Washington, D.C. David also acted as discussant for an invited session, and was presented with an award for his service to the Association for Africanist Anthropologists.
The presidential session at the AAA meetings was titled, "Africa Unbound: Trajectories of Equality, Inequality, and Social Justice in Post-Colonial Africa." The session focused on the roles that anthropologists are playing in research and development work. Turkon's paper, "Social Transformations in Africa -- AIDS, Identity, and Equality: Raising Challenges for Conceptualizing African Societies," explored how AIDS is causing social and cultural transformations across sub-Saharan Africa, and how this forces anthropologists and others to rethink their basic assumptions about social organization and interaction.
He also explored the benefits of collaborating with African researchers, who are on the frontlines of the struggle against HIV and AIDS and have firsthand experience with it. Turkon's presentation was based on research that he is doing in collaboration with scholars from the National University of Lesotho as well as the University of South Florida and the University of Toronto.
David also acted as discussant for the invited session, "Contesting Inequalities and Changing Models of Citizenship: Ethnographic and Theoretical Encounters with HIV/AIDS." The session, which was sponsored by the Association for Africanist Anthropologists, a subsection of the AAA, explored how HIV and AIDS are prompting people across Africa to renegotiate forms of identity rooted in gender, "therapeutic citizenship," orphanhood, masculinity, widowhood, and so forth.
The new subjectivities and forms of activism that are resulting from encounters with HIV and AIDS are having transformative effects across the subcontinent. Turkon's discussion focused on how valuable these ethnographic understandings are for informing innovative medical and community capacity-building interventions in ways that empower citizens to take ownership of their own problems -- thus increasing the likelihood for successful outcomes. Present interventions have traditionally been imposed using Western models for health care and community dynamics, with very limited successes.
Finally, David was awarded a certificate of recognition "in honor of outstanding service as program coordinator of the Association for Africanist Anthropologists," at the group's annual business meeting.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20071203094317109