Abstract

HIV infection is a fast growing phenomenon amongst young people worldwide. In South Africa infection rates amongst youth are particularly high, and the need to find strategies to engage young people in issues around healthy sexuality are imperative. This research uses visual and ethnographic approaches as a method for engaged research that supports community led peer education; with young people building on their own lived experience as part of the process. Borrowing from ideas of engaged pedagogy by bell hooks, Henry A. Giroux, and Paulo Friere and "thick and deep" data collection as explored by Clifford Geertz, Joseph Tobin and Claudia Mitchell, The Ground Beneath Me attempts to understand how to engage youth in creative strategies towards social change and more concentrated peer education around HIV/AIDS. This research is also influenced by understandings of AIDS in a global context through theorists such as Cindy Patton, Catherine Campbell, Paul Treichler and Paul Farmer amongst others. Ultimately this was a qualitative, open-ended process, which looked at both the process and the final works as part of the data, and generated non-empirical results (including two video by-products and a text of youth authored writing and drawing). The findings indicated the need to include young people as change agents in creating health-enabling communities; to contextualize AIDS in terms of globalization, race, poverty, and stigma; to focus attention on gender-based violence and structural violence as risk factors; and, to keep gender issues at the forefront of youth education around HIV prevention.