Speaker: Sanyu Mojola, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder
In 2009, Washington D.C. had one of the nation’s worst epidemics; 3.2% of residents were HIV positive, and African Americans were disproportionately affected. Dr. Mojola will demonstrate how classic social structural processes—such as migration, racial residential segregation, concentrated poverty, the illegal drug trade, the associated legislative War on Drugs, and mass incarceration—interacted to produce an HIV risk environment in D.C. Dr. Mojola also illustrates how these processes shaped individual HIV acquisition and transmission. The session will conclude with a discussion of the broader applicability of Dr. Mojola’s findings to understanding the social structural production of disease vulnerability and the persistence of racial health disparities in the U.S.
Registration required. Lunch will be provided for those who RSVP to attend at the School of Social Work.
Sanyu A. Mojola’s research examines how societies produce health and illness. She is especially interested in understanding social processes, mechanisms and patterns of social organization that lead to health inequality related to gender, race/ethnicity, life course stage and socio-economic status. Her past and ongoing work primarily focuses on the HIV/AIDS pandemic as it unfolds in various settings such as Kenya, the United States and South Africa. Her first book, Love, Money and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS, examines why young African women have higher rates of HIV compared to young men. The book won the 2015 Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association, was a 2015 finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Prize for Best Book on East African Studies from the African Studies Association, and won the 2016 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. Her journal article publications relating to this project have appeared in a number of outlets including Social Science and Medicine, Signs, Continuum and Studies in Family Planning. Dr Mojola also leads a project with multiple collaborators called HIV after 40: Aging in the Context of an HIV Epidemic, which is examining why HIV rates are so high among older rural South Africans.
For more information, please visit the CPRC website.
