The Biopolitics of Health Education: HIV/AIDS Curriculum as a Technology for Governing Populations

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Coloniality of Educational Knowledge and Discourse: Health and Education (Table 1)

Abstract

This paper discusses discourses that promote HIV/AIDS education as a strategy for preventing the pandemic among youth and children. It employs the concept of biopower to investigate how the politics of knowledge in HIV/AIDS education create categories of people in the name of health intervention. I argue that HIV/AIDS education functions as a strategy for governing people, which is made possible by practices that promote the creation of difference by identifying and classifying populations. I situate the discussion within the Kenyan education system’s transition to formalizing HIV/AIDS education at the turn of the twenty-first century. The shift occurred following the declaration of the pandemic as a national disaster in 1999, bringing new subjects of intervention beyond sex workers and truck drivers, who were the main targets of earlier intervention campaigns. For instance, HIV/AIDS education constituted “youth,” “adolescents,” and the “girl child” as new “at-risk” categories of research and pedagogical intervention. Methodologically, I employ the history of the present to problematize concepts often taken for granted in research, for example, adolescents, girl child, health, community, and at-risk groups. I rely on the methodology for its epistemic capacity to destabilize concepts and subjects of research, often considered incontestable, to understand the conditions that made them possible in the first place (Foucault, 1972). The analysis shows that most ideas and categories of intervention used in HIV/AIDS research and policy emerged from colonial governance strategies that involved relations of power and knowledge practices of identifying difference and classifying people on basis of race and gender. Hence, the paper problematizes HIV/AIDS education, not to reject its role in the pandemic’s prevention but to open up new possibilities of analysis. Questioning what is taken for granted makes the politics of knowledge production in HIV/AIDS education visible.
The paper begins by examining the intersections of colonial governance, health discourses, and education to understand how power sought to regulate the colonized body. The goal is to demonstrate how discourses on health, hygiene, and sanitation were deployed as a strategy for governing the habits and habitations of Africans. Moreover, it shows how colonial practices produced categories, such as African, woman/girl, and African child, as objects of knowledge. The next section of the paper shows that despite the transformations that have occurred since the colonial period, there exists colonial residues in HIV/AIDS education research, policy, and pedagogical practices employed in Kenya. Thus, failure to consider the historical and cultural conditions of the practices and concepts employed may lead to the reification of the inequalities that HIV/AIDS education prevention seeks to address. The study is timely since most countries in Africa continue to grapple with the HIV/AIDS pandemic as it enters its fourth decade while ushering in the novel COVID-19 pandemic. It aspires to spark new debates in the study of health education by challenging the conventional ways in which topics in the field have been researched. It accomplishes this through a multidisciplinary, historical, and transnational examination of HIV/AIDS education in Kenya.

Author

• Cecilia Kyalo, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author