Presenter(s): Sarita Davis, Georgia State University, saritadavis@gsu.edu
Abstract: The Sojourner Project applies an interpretive framework to explore the degree to which the intersecting lens of gender, race, and class affects the HIV risk and use of mood altering substances among 50 African American women living in both low and high burden areas in metropolitan Atlanta. Research suggests that a strictly biomedical framework for HIV and Substance abuse program planning and intervention typically serves to homogenize difference or complexity by, for example, separating race from socioeconomic status and gender as discrete, rather than mutually constitutive, concepts (Gentry, 2007; Mullings, 2005). The contribution of the Sojourner Project to evaluation is that it invites us to understand the relational nature of sexual decision making and substance abuse among dispossessed women in a way that conveys a message about the interaction of race, class, and gender, as well as dialectic of residence, resilience, and resistance (Crenshaw, 1995).