A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa

Description

In the wake of the AIDS pandemic, legions of organizations and compassionate individuals from faraway places descended on Africa to offer help and save lives. Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins vividly describe the often mismatched expectations and fantasies of altruists who dream of transforming lives, of the villagers who desperately seek help,

Ann Swidler is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Susan Cotts Watkins is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"One of Foreign Affairs Best of Books 2017 - Africa / Malawi" "Winner of the 2018 Best Scholarly Book Award, Global and Transnational Section of the American Sociological Association" "Honorable Mention for the 2018 Outstanding Published Book Award, Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity Section of the American Sociological Association" "Finalist for the 2018 Melville J. Herskovits Prize, African Studies Association" "A Fraught Embrace is both an important piece of transnational public sociology and one of the most important works in cultural sociology to have been published in a long while."---Iddo Tavory, European Journal of Sociology "Few books can claim to address a social problem involving billions of dollars with millions of lives hanging in the balance, but Swidler and Watkins's A Fraught Embrace does just that. Dissecting the role of foreign altruists and local brokers in aid efforts to stem the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa generally, and Malawi more specifically, this book makes a compelling sociological contribution to the study of foreign aid-a field of research more often reserved for economists and international development studies scholars."---Liam Swiss, American Journal of Sociology