“Living with HIV” – Changes in HIV and AIDS Metaphors in South African Educational Policy

Abstract

Health metaphors are commonly used in a variety of contexts. While warmetaphors are common in medicine, there are also other conceptualizationsand other metaphors employed in different contexts. In policies, metaphorscan play an important role in framing thought and discourse, and have animportant effect, and even more so in educational policy. In this article, weanalyze the two South African policies regarding HIV and AIDS in the educa-tional context – the first policy from 1999, and the one that replaced it in2017. The focus is on identifying and categorizing the metaphors directlyrelated to HIV and AIDS. We identified 29 such metaphors in policy 1, and 71in policy 2, using the principles from the MIPVU, and thematic discourseanalysis was used to categorize the metaphors into themes. The mostprominent changes in the metaphors from policy 1 to policy 2 regard thefocus of the imagery, as well as the conceptualization of HIV itself. These arethen interpreted in the Southern African context.