Browsing by Author "Parker, Warren."

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The development of community-based media for AIDS education and prevention in South Africa: towards an action-based participatory research model.
(1994) Parker, Warren.; Tomaselli, Keyan Gray.
This research explores the development of community-based media for HIV/AIDS education and prevention. The theoretical framework for the research was based in semiotic, cultural studies and participatory action research perspectives and is critical of conventional approaches to communication and media production. Conceptual ideas for the media products emerged through interaction with small groups of participants utilising participatory action research and focus group methodology. A series of posters were produced and distributed within the communities studied. The research demonstrates a practicable and replicable methodology for deriving community perspectives around a range of issues and articulating these via small media products. The methodology is relevant to health education, but may also be applicable to a range of community-based initiatives that seek to facilitate social change.
Ideology, hegemony and HIV/AIDS : the appropriation of indigenous and global spheres.
(2004) Parker, Warren.; Tomaselli, Keyan Gray.
Ideology is a fundamental aspect of society, and ideological analysis has been applied to the development of explanatory frameworks for understanding structural dominance within social formations. Structural and post-structural conceptions of ideology have focused on macro-ideological phenomena and processes, offering explanation of relations between economic base and super-structure as they interrelate with ideological dominance. Ideologies serve the interests of particular social formations or classes over others, and at the macro-level this has to do with organised thought as it relates to power. This thesis explores the concept of ideology and related concepts of dominance, power and hegemony, through relocating macrolevel understandings and analysis of ideology within analysis of superstructural entities - notably organisations, groups and elites. HIV/AIDS is an ecological phenomenon that is accompanied by processes of sense-making that incorporate ideological dimensions in the public sphere, particularly in relation to social policy and strategy. Ideological discourses about HIV/AIDS have drawn on specific epistemological foundations and world-views, incorporating intersections with parallel ideologies, and in many instances being directed towards achieving expansion and dominance of particular ideas. This ideological strategy incorporates the construction of common sense. Ideological claims are reiterative, but are also related to processes of legitimation that combine structural relations with communicative power. A South African HIV/AIDS programme, LoveLife, is utilised as a case study to demonstrate ideological trajectories over time. The inter-relation between claims about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, claims about impact of the LoveLife programme, and the utility of alliances and structural partnerships in legitimating such claims is explored. These claims-making processes are found to also occur at global level through the active resourcing and facilitation by LoveLife programme's founding funder, the Kaiser Family Foundation. These activities intersect in the development of an ideological bloc that is directed towards expansion and dominance through appropriation of indigenous and global discourse spheres.
Us and them : loveLife, commercial brands and everyday life.
(2007) Delate, Richard Cecil.; Parker, Warren.
The issue of branding with regard to public health communication is the topic of this thesis. The case study investigated is that of the loveLife Lifestyle brand introduced to South Africa in 1999 by the US-based Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation. loveLife brought together the collective efforts of a consortium of NGOs concerned with adolescent reproductive health in South Africa with the primary objective of reducing the rate of new HIV infections, sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancy through promoting a healthy lifestyle approach using traditional commercial marketing techniques. This study draws upon the Circuit of Culture to explore the manner in which the meaning of the loveLife lifestyle brand discourse is constructed, produced, distributed and consumed through using a semiotic approach. To achieve this the study explores the meanings represented by loveLife through examining the images and texts from the television and radio programmes, outdoor media; print publications and public relations produced by loveLife. The manner in which these meanings were produced by loveLife as articulated in various policy documents. It explores how young people aged 12-17 from different socio-economic backgrounds consume and make meaning of the loveLife brand and use these in everyday life to express meaning about themselves in their social interaction and how carcereal networks of power comprising parents, religious groups and AIDS organizations have sought to regulate the meaning and social identities that arise from the representation of the brand. The study concludes that the representation of the loveLife lifestyle brand has given rise to a brand identity that positions adolescent sexuality as something that is cool and that everyone is engaged in. This representation has been the result of a deliberate brand strategy by loveLife that has sought to encourage more open discussions between parents and youth on issues relating to sex and sexuality. The unintentional consequence arising from this representation is that in their consumption of the meanings of loveLife, loveLife's interpersonal facilities are decoded by others in the community as being spaces that encourage sexual interaction by young people. Young people who attend these facilities are by implication decoded as being sexually active. This undermines the intention of the producers of creating spaces where young people can engage and interact in a variety of recreational activities including learning about sexual and reproductive health. An additional unintentional consequence of the representation is that stakeholders who exert power over young people such as parents and religious leaders have actively sought to regulate the meaning of the brand either through using formal channels of protest such as the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa or through preventing their youth from participating in loveLife's interpersonal programme. This study proposes that the quality of media messages be measured in relation to the meanings that consumers and those that interact with them decode. This includes exploring the social identities that these meanings give rise to and manner in which these find meaning through everyday interaction and the extent to which these meanings correlate with those intended by the producers of the message.