African and Nordic,
Gender and Religion,
May 25-27, 2010
About "Broken Women, Healing Traditions?"
One of the greatest challenges facing the global community today is to successfully combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic which in Africa is paramount. Yet, its success will depend on whether we are able to support women’s agency and emerging leadership roles, overcome the overly curative and moralist discourse of HIV/AIDS, and extend the field to include a deeper and more communal healing approach.
The project studies appropriation of indigenous social and religious knowledge in order to assist just power relations between women and men in the context of HIV/AIDS. By drawing upon interreligious practises of African and Christian in the making and social recognition of protective, ritual and untouchable space, we will contribute to build healing communities of active prevention and self-education.
The project have formulated three interrelated sub-projects:
Subproject 1: Indigenous religious resources and new gender relations
Collect IsiZulu myths, tales proverbs and sayings that deal with
gender in marriage and polygamy and search for
critiques of patriarchy from within the tradition itself.
Subproject 2. Interreligious ritualisation, social transformation and the invention of protective space
Through a detailed ethnographic study bring forth new knowledge
of how women adapt and transform how
religion appears and what religion does in a South African context
challenged by HIV/AIDS, and how they invent protective and shielding spaces.
See also HIV University
Subproject 3. "Untouchable Space" as critical theological reflection on human autonomy and interdependence
Explore the concept of "untouchable" space as theological reflection
on autonomy and interdependence and reading this findings with
narratives of HIV positive women´s experiences.
