Collaging Complexity: Youth, HIV/AIDS and the Site/Sight of Sexuality

• Main Author: Switzer, Sarah Lynne
• Other Authors: Gaztambide-Fernandez, Ruben
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: HIV/AIDS; Youth; Arts-Based Research Methodologies; Visual Culture; Curriculum; Sexuality Education; 0680; 0453; 0273; 0727
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/18110

Using collage as a methodological and conceptual framework for re-conceptualizing knowledge in HIV/AIDS education, this thesis attends to young women’s understandings of HIV/AIDS and sexuality. Through engaging in the process of making collages, what stories do young women tell about HIV/AIDS? What discourses are produced when collage and narrative are used as methodological tools to address participants’ understandings of HIV/AIDS? By responding to their own collage texts, as well as the collage texts of others, how are issues of representation addressed? Using narrative and post-structural discourse analysis, this study explores how participants’ complex and contradictory understandings of HIV/AIDS diverge from the content and form of current school-based HIV/AIDS curriculum. Whereas the curriculum presupposes a rational and linear subject, participants’ reflexive understandings of HIV/AIDS shift throughout the study, varying as a result of roles performed, the context of the collage or image being discussed, and the dynamic interchange between participants.