Social Science Research Council

The Council's HIV/AIDS Initiative is engaged in the development of research activities in a number of areas. In virtually all cases, different Council staff and programs are involved in mobilizing the development of projects. This has helped to create or deepen synergies across programs and new internal collaborations.

Rural Communities
The Council's Program on Applied Economics is developing a research project for submission to the NIH on the impact of HIV/AIDS on rural communities in Africa. The focus of this project drew from a planning meeting held in September 2003. Building on early efforts in the field across four research sites in rural communities in eastern and southern Africa, the project seeks to understand how the severity and breadth of household impact is challenging local institutions, social cohesiveness and livelihood strategies. It is being designed with a view to furthering our understanding of the comparative context facing different regions and villages across Africa, and of the connections between effects at the level of households and those at the level of communities. Understanding the broader context of community life-its connection to local markets, migration networks, clan structures and leaders-will allow us to examine the structures, networks and community-wide responses that predict more resilience.

Global Institutions/China
The SSRC's program on the Corporation as a Social Institution is developing a project to study the ways that corporations, local governments, and nonprofit organizations come together (or don't) to form a response to treatment of AIDS. The aim is to develop a research design using China as a potentially adaptable model for studies of organizational responses to AIDS around the world. The project anticipates that variation in the local/regional shape of existing (or emerging) organizational networks built through the process of market change in China will provide an important foundation for the specific types of collaborative responses in each region. In a second phase, aspects of the methodological approach and analytical framework will be reconfigured for use in other settings where the pandemic is creating major public health crises but where the organizational infrastructures and institutional landscapes differ greatly from China and where international donor funds are more consequential than private investment (e.g., Africa).

Orphans and Vulnerable Children
Working with the International Center for Migration and Health in Geneva, the Council is hoping to develop a research agenda on HIV/AIDS and the growing challenge of orphans and orphan care. This agenda calls attention to the dynamics of the problem, its social history and social and medical epidemiology and a range of social and psychological parameters. Likely areas of focus include the developmental needs of children; their coping capacities; the social psychology of parent loss; the implication of HIV/AIDS stigma in the response to orphans; the policy and program options for dealing with orphans in resource poor countries; the implications of institutionalized versus non-institutionalized care; and the economic dimensions of orphan care. Support for advancing this agenda is being pursued with USAID.

Youth, HIV/AIDS and Armed Conflict
Acting upon a request from the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict (a partner with our Children and Armed Conflict Program) the SSRC is developing an initiative to assess the correlation of the spread of HIV/AIDS and armed conflict, especially as it affects young boys and girls. HIV/AIDS spirals under conditions of war, but the precise empirical connections between it and such conflict related phenomena as forced migration and the mobility of troops and peacekeepers are contested. The Council plans to raise funds with the Special Representative's Office in order to coordinate research to carefully assess the evidence of these links.

Migration and Sexuality
The Council's Program on International Migration and Program on Sexuality Research have convened a planning meeting with relevant researchers and are exploring a joint project on migrant networks, sexual networks and the social impacts of HIV/AIDS. Three general frames for a future research agenda and research have been identified: (1) the impact of HIV/AIDS interventions in targeting migrant populations; (2) migrant networks and their relation to the spread of AIDS as well as the impact of AIDS on patterns of migration; (3) migration and conflict related issues including forced migration, sexual trafficking and HIV/AIDS within the military and peacekeeping operations.

Intellectual Property, Markets, and HIV/AIDS
As part of the Council's project on Intellectual Property, Markets, and Cultural Flows, we have commissioned a mapping of research issues related to intellectual property and access to medicine to treat HIV/AIDS. The question of affordable access to ARV's extends to a number of issues under consideration by the IP Committee like the growing international flows of pirated and generic medicines, attempts to mobilize "national" concepts of the public good (especially health) against an international intellectual property framework that has no equivalent, and arbitrage between the US, states and collective bargaining entities abroad.