Browsing by Person "Ranjbar, Vania"

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If they have a girlfriend, they have five girlfriends': Accountability and sexism in volunteer workers' talk about HIV/AIDS in a South African health setting
(Sage, 2016-04-19) McVittie, Chris; McKinlay, Andy; Ranjbar, Vania
Significant challenges remain in tackling the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. Effective action requires both appropriate policy at a global level and informed practice on the local level. Here we report how workers in a project in Johannesburg, South Africa make sense of HIV transmission. Discourse analysis of data from interviews with 63 participants shows that project workers routinely attribute transmission to men's sexual relationships with multiple female partners. This explanation is so pervasive that it renders invisible other routes to transmission. Absence of consideration of other routes to infection potentially restricts front-line practice, so hindering local attempts to tackle HIV/AIDS.
Researching Aid Workers' Constructions of HIV / AIDS in South Africa using Interview-based Discourse Analysis
(Sage, 2017-02-06) Ranjbar, Vania; McVittie, Chris
This case study discusses the design and use of research interviews in conducting a discourse analytic study of the experiences of HIV / AIDS aid workers in South Africa. For many years, research interviews have been a commonly used method of collecting qualitative data. Recently interviews have come to be seen less as a means for the interviewer to elicit information from the interviewee and instead as conversational encounters that are jointly constructed by the interviewer and interviewee. Even on this changing view, however, the use of interviews to collect qualitative data is a contested issue within discourse analytic research. Some writers argue that research interviews constitute a form of interaction that is markedly different from other forms of interaction, while other writers argue that research interviews can be treated as reasonably resembling interactions found elsewhere if the interviewer designs and conducts interviews that allow for appropriate interactional involvement of interviewees. Here we discuss how the interviewer established working relationships with the participants before conducting the interviews. We examine how the design of this project allowed interviews to participate meaningfully in the interview interactions as reflected in the data that were jointly produced. We conclude by discussing the advantages of this project design for exploring the experiences of the participants in this case.
The micro and the macro: How discourse of control maintains HIV-related stigma
(Sage, 2016-01-10) Ranjbar, Vania; McKinlay, Andy; McVittie, Chris
In this article, we examine how HIV/AIDS caregivers negotiate stigma in their discourse of providing care to HIV-positive individuals. Using interview data, we demonstrate how participants employed discourse of control in attempting to avoid and counter HIV-related stigma: participants rejected fear of associating with HIV-positive individuals by drawing on their knowledge of HIV transmission and their ability to control and avoid infection. Such discourses backfire, however, as the concept of HIV infection being controllable and thus avoidable maintains accountability for the disease. Thus, participants' micro discourse of control can maintain the macro discourse that produces HIV-related stigma.