Actor-Networks, Waves and Verticality: Tracing HIV/AIDS Activism from late Apartheid to the Present in South Africa

What is it about?

The article offers a new approach to analyzing how social movements change over time. Here, the history of the South African HIV/AIDS movement is analyzed based on key inter-personal relationships that connect waves of HIV/AIDS activism. This 'vertical' approach provides a complementary perspective to contemporary analyses of social movements, which trace the 'horizontal' dissemination of transnational social movement knowledge practices.

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Why is it important?

The article's key contribution is a conceptual mechanism for grounding the analysis of historical change within the inter-personal networks of social movements: verticality. A focus on inter-personal relationships creates an ethnographic foundation from which to analyze how and when particular social movement knowledge practices were transmitted from one generation of social activists to another. The 'verticality' approach offers a complementary tool to researchers who seek to disaggregate the social, geographic, and historical roots from which a particular social movement knowledge practice emerged.