The DePauw Features sat down with Rebecca Upton on Tuesday, March 11 to bring you her story. Here's what she had to say:
TDP Features: "Where are you from originally?"
Rebecca Upton (RU): "That's an interesting question. I'm a U.S. citizen. I was born in the US, but I spent most of my formative years in the Marshall Islands. I grew up in the Marshall Islands. I was just having this conversation today about considering myself a Pacific Islander versus anything else, but my family all come from New England, so I happen to be a huge Red Sox fan. I grew up in the tropics. Maybe it's why I'm an anthropologist. I don't know."
TDP Features: "How did you choose Botswana as your place of research?"
RU: "I spent a good deal of time when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Nigeria, and I had already been to Kenya. I was Colgate [University's] first official African studies major. I majored in sociology / anthropology and African studies. I always thought I was going to go back to West Africa. I was in grad school when fewer and fewer people were getting visas to study in Nigeria or go back to West Africa somewhere. I had a foreign language studies fellowship to learn Tswana, so I studied at Boston University, and then traveled throughout South Africa up to Botswana and eventually spent some time in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. I found my second home, I guess, in Botswana. I mean, I was interested in the question of a place like Botswana where childbearing is so important to one's identity: what happens if you can't have children and how do people think about that? It was also the place that still has one of the highest instance and prevalence rates of HIV, so for those two different reasons. I learned the language. I had traveled there. It became my second home, and I haven't been back to West Africa. I don't know. Maybe someday."
TDP Features: "What sort of research do you do in Botswana?"
RU: "For almost 20 years now, I've been looking at the social as well as physiological intersections between infertility and fertility and reproductive health and HIV / AIDS. It's not enough to simply say someone has HIV, but how is it understood socially and in context? Infertility gets characterized as something that only women have, and so I want to find out why is that? What are the explanations for that, and how does that intersect with an HIV epidemic? If you understand how important child bearing is, you'll understand why people put themselves in risky sexual partnerships or interactions. More recently, I'm interested in both the ethics of ARV (anti-retrovirals) care. All citizens in Botswana are provided free anti-retrovirals, but there's a huge Zimbabwean refugee camp up in the northeast, and they are not granted access to that free medicine that can improve quality of life.
An interesting theme that I followed through was access to care because assisted reproductive technologies also don't exist in Botswana. We're really accustomed to IVF (in vitro fertilization) and donors eggs and all of the variations of a medical intervention model. In Botswana, there's not access for anyone there. If you are infertile, you have to become a migrant and go to South Africa.
It's a lot that I'm interested in, but they're all interconnected in terms of the social and physiological perceptions of health."
TDP Features: "What is your approach to teaching?"
RU: "One thing that I really emphasize in the intro level courses is that we want to learn to make the familiar unfamiliar. You know, make the things that are strange seem familiar to us and the things that are familiar to us strange. I spend a lot of time asking people about their own experiences and then trying to connect those to cross-cultural examples. At the moment, I'm teaching a course that's grown out of my own pursuit of public health in Africa, and I'm really trying to emphasize in my approach to recognize the colonial history and the impact of that on contemporary medical discourse and policy decisions in the continent. I think keeping people aware of their assumptions and biases, not in the effort to provide endless guilt or something, but rather to make better policies and more efficacious plans and recognize our own assumptions."