ALP Research Associates in MaseruIn October 2009, ALP Lesotho Research Associates met for a five-day ALP Induction and Orientation workshop led by Tim Hughes (ALP Lesotho co-Manager) and Kimberly Smiddy (ALP Senior Research Associate) at the Black Swan Lodge in Maseru, Lesotho. Thabo Mosoeunyane, Setsabi Setsabi, Seroala Tsoeu and Maseqobela Mohale are conducting ALP research in Lesotho with Prof. Sejanamane serving as an advisor. During the ALP workshop, the Lesotho Research Associates discussed their parliament's new committee system and the growing importance of parliament in democratic governance in Lesotho.

Prof Jeremy Seekings, director of the SSU, was recently interviewed on his research for "The MacMillan Report" of the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

Video courtesy of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

Prof Nicoli Nattrass, director of ASRU, was recently interviewed on her research for "The MacMillan Report" of the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

Video courtesy of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

ASRU director, Prof Nicoli Nattrass, this week presented preliminary research on denialist beliefs among young South Africans at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her analysis is based on the Cape Area Panel Study which is a major survey conducted by the Centre for Social Science Research in partnership with Michigan State University. The results show a relationship between trust in former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and denialist beliefs among respondents. Prof Nattrass has previously published on former President Mbeki's AIDS denialism in her book Mortal Combat and has published estimates of the number of deaths caused by the failure to provide antiretroviral treatment.

Update: A video of the event can now be viewed here.

The Harvard Gazette reports:

Nicoli Nattrass, director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit and economics professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, presented preliminary results from a large-scale study of teenagers and young adults there. The results, which are still being analyzed, show that denialist beliefs are held disproportionately by black African men and are far more likely to be held by those supportive of Mbeki’s health minister, who has been replaced by the current administration.

Recent research showed how damaging denialist beliefs can be, concluding that Mbeki’s failure to roll out HIV drugs between 2000 and 2005 resulted in 330,000 unnecessary deaths and the infection of 3,500 infants with HIV.

Photo by Justin Ide, Harvard Staff Photographer.

The website for the African Legislatures Project (ALP), co-managed by DARU, has been launched. The purpose of ALP is both simple and grand—to learn everything important there is to know about how African legislatures function. As such, ALP is an exercise that straddles the realms of academic research and practice – in this case, research into the operations of the legislature and what its findings suggest for African parliaments, organisations working in legislative and democratic reform and supportive donor agencies. If you wish to learn more about ALP, visit the new project website.

Jeremy Seekings is co-convenor of the first Urban Studies School being held under the auspices of Research Committee 21 of the International Sociology Association and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), in Sao Paulo, between 17 and 25 August 2009. This School - a Winter School in the Southern Hemisphere, but a Summer School from the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere - will bring together twenty-five young researchers from around the world and a team of senior urban scholars, to address a variety of topics in urban studies.  See further http://www.shakti.uniurb.it/rc21/.

The latest issue of the African Journal of AIDS Research (8,2, 2009) includes two articles by CSSR researchers.  Rene Brandt (ASRU) reviews existing studies of the mental health of people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. Rachel Bray (SSU) analyses ethnographic data from a Cape Town township on how HIV-positive or AIDS-sick women make decisions about where to live, with whom, and where their children should live. See:

Brand, R. The mental health of people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa: a systematic review.
Bray, R. How does AIDS illness affect women's residential decisions? Findings from an ethnographic study in a Cape Town township

The Making the Most of Commodities Programme (MMCP) held its second workshop focused on developing a common methodology on 21st – 25^th July 2009 in the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town. The MMCP is a collaborative research and policy programme between PRISM and the Open University. The general objective of the research and policy activities of the MMCP is to assist African countries to minimise the potential costs of the boom in commodity prices, to maximise the possible industry and knowledge intensive service linkage opportunities to promote sustainable industrial growth, and to ensure widespread access to the fruits of this growth in a context of good governance.

Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings are part of an international research collaboration on state-business relations for the project on Institutions for Pro-Poor Growth (IPPG). The IPPG project explores the proposition that political and social institutions have a direct bearing on economic institutions and thereby on economic growth and distribution. Nattrass and Seekings are conducting a South African case study of how state-business relations are shaped by the historical growth path and by labour-market institutions inherited from the past, but which nevertheless are strongly influenced by policy changes (notably black economic empowerment). They argue that South Africa's growth path will only become 'pro-poor' when institutional changes are made to facilitate a more labour-demanding growth path. This, however, would require compromises from organised labour. These ideas have been aired in business forums as part of the ongoing research process.