Graduate Student, Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Social Science
University of Michigan, Anthropology
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Karen Staller
Elisha Renne |
About
Ellen Block is a PhD Candidate in Social Work and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her current ethnographic research focuses on caregiving practices for AIDS orphans in rural Lesotho, Africa. She explores how networks of kinship and caring have been disrupted by HIV/AIDS in rural Lesotho, and how families are coping with these changes and with the illness itself. In order to do this, she examines the physical, economic, material, and emotional challenges of orphan care, the difficulties of treating HIV/AIDS in a rural sub-Saharan African context with a focus on the intersection of biomedical beliefs and practices with cultural ones, and the reorganization of families as a result of these factors. The goal of this research is to better understand the impact HIV/AIDS has on families with an eye towards identifying potential areas of intervention that will help to support families caring for AIDS orphans.
