Lydia C. Boyd
Associate Professor
Lydia Boyd is a cultural and medical anthropologist with a research focus in Uganda. Her work considers issues of health, religion, and the moral and political frameworks that shape health behavior. Her first book, Preaching Prevention: Born-Again Christianity and the Moral Politics of AIDS in Uganda, Ohio University Press, 2015, examined the interconnected effects of religious activism and global health policy on AIDS prevention and sexual health in Uganda. She investigated the impact of one of the U.S.’s largest global health programs to date, President’s Bush’s 2003 PEPFAR program, in terms of the cultural and moral logics that motivated Ugandan Christian activists who popularized its HIV-prevention strategies, “abstain and be faithful”. Broadly, this project considered how medical discourses of health and disease intersect with contemporary and historical anxieties concerning sexual morality, marriage, kinship, and gender relations in Uganda.
This research grew to consider other aspects of social activism within the born-again community in Uganda, including a study that focused on the moral and cultural cosmologies that have animated the backlash against homosexuality and sexual rights in Uganda. As part of her fieldwork with Ugandan Christian youth, she has also researched and written about the growing popularity of Christian popular culture and other religious media in Kampala, as well as the humanitarian relationships formed between American Christians and Ugandan Christians. This body of work examines the ways different models for ethical behavior compete in Uganda, and shape experiences with and understanding of the value of a variety of projects that fall under the umbrella of “development” and “global health.”
A second strand of Dr. Boyd’s research focuses on human rights discourse in Africa, especially as it relates to growing legislation limiting sexuality-based rights in Africa. She recently completed work on an edited volume, Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society, and the State, Wisconsin 2020, with her colleague Emily Burrill. Using sexual and gender-based rights as an analytic lens, this collection explores how contestations over gendered and sexual categories shed light on broader concerns over citizenship, moral personhood, economic change, and political agency in African communities today.
A third research area examines issues relating to reproductive and maternal health in Uganda. This current project addresses several overlapping topics, including women’s use of both biomedical and non-biomedical care during pregnancy, traditional discourses and practices shaping women’s experiences of health and fertility, and debates surrounding these issues in global and Ugandan national policy.
Dr. Boyd is also a documentary filmmaker and received a Certificate in Culture & Media from the interdisciplinary program in Media, Culture and History at New York University.