At a recent Emory global health seminar series, Kate Winskell showed how fiction penned by young Africans can help inform the response to HIV and AIDS. Since 1997, more than 145,000 young Africans have participated in scriptwriting contests as part of Scenarios from Africa HIV communication process.
The resulting archive of stories is a unique source of cross-cultural and longitudinal data on social representations of HIV and AIDS. The archive now spans 47 countries and a critical 12-year period in the history of the epidemic. Winskell’s presentation analyzed the stories that were part of the 2005 Scenarios contest. Six African countries were represented.
The seed for Scenarios was planted more than a decade ago–before the rise of the Internet—when Winskell, a public health educator, and her husband, Daniel Enger, were searching for innovative ways to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS. The old ways of trying to stop the spread of the disease, focusing only on medical aspects of the epidemic or relying on educational materials that were not culturally adapted, were clearly limited.