Popular understanding of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa is riddled with contradiction and speculation. This is revealed in HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, which explores the various contexts in which debate about HIV/AIDS takes place and examines how the pandemic is perceived by scholars, religious leaders and traditional healers, among others - in communities in and around South Africa. Using a social theory lens, the book focuses on not only the cultural and contextual practices, but also the methodological and epistemological orientations around HIV/AIDS in education that shape community and individual interpretations of this disease.

The book avoids a simplistic approach to the pandemic, by exploring the complex and sometimes contradictory spaces in which HIV/AIDS discourses are negotiated, and thus goes some way to present a more hermeneutic profile of the HIV/AIDS problem. HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa is as much about identity construction as it is about HIV/AIDS. The authors recognise the interrelatedness of sex, sexuality, identity and HIV/AIDS in the shaping of individual and collective identities and have thus gone beyond merely asking questions about what people know.