In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.”

In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.

Claire Laurier Decoteau is associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she teaches courses in social theory, the sociology of knowledge, and health and medicine. She is also a research associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She lives in Chicago.

She is currently working on two new projects. The first focuses on epistemic contestations over definitions of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She has engaged in archival research on the US federal vaccine court proceedings on autism where the controversial link between childhood vaccinations and autism development was forced to stand trial. And she has begun to collect qualitative research with Somali refugee parents of children with autism in Minneapolis and Toronto. She is interested in understanding what makes a group of people forge a knowledge community around a particular theory of causation. The second project focuses on women working in South Africa’s informal economy and explores the relationship between ‘transactional’ sexual practices and sex work in contemporary Johannesburg.

Her project was selected as the recipient of American Sociological Association Dissertation Award in 2009.