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Notes on the Plague Years: AIDS in Marseilles (Social Problems and Social Issues)
Notes on the Plague Years AIDS in Marseilles - Social Problems and Social Issues Author:Bernard Paillard In 1988 Paillard, a sociologist based at a center for interdisciplinary research in Paris, was sent down to Marseilles by the National Agency for AIDS Research as leader of a team investigating the societal impact of the epidemic that had struck that large, diversified Mediterranean seaport city in full force. He would remain for four years, obs... more »erving the progress of the epidemic and interviewing those involved: doctors, patients, and subpopulations at risk. His research resulted in this rather different book, reflexive instead of empirical, a qualitative study in narrative form of a community's response (and his own) to the epidemic unfolding tragically in front of them, bringing rumor and panic in its wake. It is a study in problem formation and "moral panic" - a category of investigation in which he has been recognized as a pioneer. Dreading AIDS as a social totality, nourished in its complexity with specters equating blood, sex, and death, Paillard begins by assuming the remoteness of the epidemic and ends by accepting its common humanity.« less