Lydia C Boyd

Lydia Boyd is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in medical and visual anthropology.  Her first book, Preaching Prevention: Born-Again Christianity and the Moral Politics of AIDS in Uganda (Ohio University Press, 2015), examines 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 the Ugandan Christian activists who popularized its HIV-prevention strategies (“abstain and be faithful”). Broadly, this research considers 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 has expanded in recent years to address other strands of social activism within the born-again community in Uganda, including work that examined the moral and cultural cosmologies that animate 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 religious media in Kampala. Her current fieldwork focuses on reproductive health policy in Uganda.