Children’s images of HIV/AIDS in Uganda: What visual methodologies can tell us about their knowledge and life circumstances

Abstract

Abstract In this study we draw on three analytic frameworks (Goffman 1981. Forms of talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press; Rose 2007. Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. London: Sage; Warburton 1998. Cartoons and teachers: Mediated visual images as data. In John Prosser (ed.), Image-based research: A sourcebook for qualitative researchers, 252–262. London: Routledge) to explore how multilingual children in a rural Ugandan primary school use visual and linguistic modes to create billboards messages about HIV/AIDS. Although HIV/AIDS education is required curriculum in public schools, and outside of the classroom students are exposed to various national public service announcements (e. g., on radio and television, and as billboards), there are still considerable cultural barriers that hinder open discussions between children and their teachers and parents about HIV/AIDS-related issues. Our findings suggest that communicating the complex language of HIV/AIDS prevention requires students in this cultural context to go beyond the linguistic mode and draw upon the visual in order to achieve a fuller range of socio-affective expression, and conceivably, to affect change by reaching a variety of audiences on multiple levels of human meaning making. Implications for literacy educators in multilingual contexts, where pressing social issues intersect with culturally sensitive or otherwise “unspeakable” topics, indicate that the visual offers a less institutionalized and culturally-laden space for children to synthesize the messages in their environments and their own relationship to them.