Welcoming address by the host Professor Pieter Fourie of UNISA

Ladies and Gentlemen

It gives me pleasure to welcome you to Unisa’s Department of Communication Science for this first SACOMM workshop on the critical topic of HIV/AIDS. I especially want to welcome Volker Hooyberg, who has organised this workshop, guest speakers from other disciplines and our colleagues from the University of Zululand.

In South Africa, the involvement of communication science in the study of HIV/AIDS is far from what it can and should be.

As a discipline, communication has as its primary objective to understand human understanding and to contribute to the improvement of such understanding through the various means of communication, be it the media of mass communication or the self as instrument of communication with others and in groups.

The time has come for us in communication to ask ourselves critically: What have and are we doing to contribute to the understanding of such a devastating disease such as HIV/AIDS? For the individual, the disease has life-threatening consequences. For society, it has devastating social and economic consequences. Therefore it is of crucial importance to understand what HIV/AIDS is and how to deal with it?

What can communication science do to break down the misunderstandings, the stereotypes, the prejudices, stigmas, fear, and anxiety, in order to create a more caring society committed to stopping the disease’s onslaught on humanity and our society?

I think there’s a lot we can do. Through communication research and the dissemination of knowledge accumulated through such research, we could, for example, contribute:

• to enhance relationships between patients and healthcare workers
• improved communication and thus understanding and empathy between sufferers and their people and communities
• more intelligible, usable and applicable information to the public
• more intelligible information from scientists and the medical profession to the public and with sufferers and communities, and
• less sensational information from the media, in which the focus tends to be on death statistics, conflict of various kinds, and in which reporting is often misleading. Such reporting is to the detriment of information which has as its underlying purpose the establishment of a new morality characterised by empathy and a social commitment to combatting the disease on all levels in the interest and well-being of our country.

The purpose of this specific workshop is to take note of the kind of research going on in the field. Therefore Volker and Lincoln have invited a number of scholars representing different disciplines: psychology, education, theology, medical science, sociology, linguistics & document design.

I am confident that we in communication science will benefit from your knowledge towards our own future research.

Pieter Fourie
Department of Communication Science
University of South Africa
Pretoria
4 November 2005