Kaler, Amy
6-14 HM Tory
780.492.7579 phone
780.492.7196 fax
amy.kaler@ualberta.ca
Assistant Professor
Social Structure and Social Policy
PhD (Sociology) 1998
University of Minnesota
Research Interests
I am interested in power, identity, culture, structure and individual agency. These interests translate into questions such as "How do people perceive the options available to them in their lives, and how do they choose among these options?" "How do people integrate new things, be they technologies, ideas, or resources, into their lives?" "How do people pursue their own goals, while coping with the constraints of the social structures they live in?" "What stories do people make up to account for their own lives, the lives of other people around them, and the changing times they live in?". And in particular, "What does gender have to do with this?"
In concrete terms, the way that I've chosen to explore these questions is through studying the organization of fertility, sexuality, and human reproduction. Human reproduction is crucially significant in all societies for two reasons:
1: because of its intrinsic biological importance as the way that societies and groups within societies maintain their existence over time; and
2: because sexuality and fertility are so laden with symbolic meaning, in cultural productions such as myths, art and ideology and also in individuals' sense of identity.
Through studying how fertility and sexuality are controlled and managed in any time and place we can learn a lot about gender, identity and power are constructed in that time and place, and we can learn about the sorts of structures which constrain women's and men's choices in life. Fertility, sexuality and reproduction, in other words, from a lens through which we can view some of the most interesting of all social processes. Having reproduction as an empirical focus also enables me to be involved in diverse specializations in sociology and the social sciences, including demography, social history, gender studies, cultural studies and policy studies.
My research to date has consisted of qualitative fieldwork and historical work in southern and eastern Africa, although I am also very interested in the organization of gender and reproduction in other parts of the world, especially present-day North America.
Selected Recent Publications
Amy Kaler, Running After Pills: Gender, Politics and Contraception in Colonial Rhodesia Portsmouth NH: Heinemann (Social History of Africa Series). December 2003
Amy Kaler, The Future of Female-Controlled Barrier Methods for HIV Prevention: Female Condoms and Lessons Learned. Culture, Health and Sexuality, in press.
Amy Kaler, The Moral Lens of Population Control: Condoms and Controversies in Southern Malawi. Studies in Family Planning, June 2004, 35:2, np.
Amy Kaler, AIDS-talk in Everyday Life: HIV/AIDS in Men's Informal Conversation in Southern Malawi, 1999-2001. Social Science and Medicine, July 2004, 59:2, 285-298
Amy Kaler, The Female Condom in North America: Selling the Technology of Empowerment. Journal of Gender Studies, July 2004, 13:2, np.
Amy Kaler, "My Girlfriends Could Fill A Yanu-Yanu Bus": Rural Malawian Men's Claims About Their Own Serostatus. Demographic Research, Special Collection 1 (September 2003), 350-372.
Running After Pills: Gender, Politics and Contraception in Colonial Rhodesia Portsmouth NH: Heinemann (Social History of Africa Series), December 2003.
Amy Kaler, Many Divorces and Many Spinsters: Marriage as an Invented Tradition in Southern Malawi. Journal of Family History October 2001, 529-556.
Amy Kaler and Susan Watkins, Disobedient Distributors: Street-level Bureaucrats and Would-Be Patrons in Community Based Family Planning Programs in Rural Kenya. Studies in Family Planning, September 2001, 254-269.
Amy Kaler, "It's Some Kind of Women's Empowerment": The Ambiguity of the Female Condom as a Marker of Female Empowerment Social Science and Medicine, 52 (Spring 2001), 783-796
Amy Kaler, "Who Has Told You To Do This Thing?": Contraception as Subversion in Rhodesia 1970-1980. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 25:3 (Spring 2000) 677-708
Amy Kaler, Visions of Domesticity in the African Women's Homecraft Movement in Colonial Rhodesia. Social Science History 23:3 (Fall 1999) 269-309.
Amy Kaler, A Threat to the Nation and a Threat to the Men: The Prohibition of Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe 1981. Journal of Southern African Studies 24:2 (June 1998) 347-376.
Amy Kaler, Maternal Identity and War in Mothers of the Revolution. Journal of the National Women's Studies Association, 9 (Spring 1997), 1-21.
Selected Grants / Awards
2004: Received Faculty of Arts Research Award, given annually for "extraordinary accomplishment in research at the assistant professor level".
2003: Canadian Institutes of Health Research: "Pre-grant" for five-year
Programmatic Operating Grant concerning caregiving for terminally ill
people with AIDS in western Uganda and Natal, South Africa (with Walter
Kipp [Faculty of Medicine], Duncan Saunders [Faculty of Medicine], Judy
Mill [School of Nursing] and Michelle Veeman [Faculty of Agriculture,
Forestry and Home Economics]). $50 000 over one year to prepare for 5-year
grant submission for intervention research
2002: Three-year Standard Research Grant from the Social Science and
Humanities Research Council (Canada) to develop a global ethnography of the
female condom
2002: Three-year Research Development Grant (Strategic Initiatives Program)
from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada) for work
on reproductive health and gendered subjectivities in Canada and the United
States
2001: Independent researcher grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to
support field work interviewing elders in communities in southern Malawi
2000: Grant from the Support for the Advancement of Scholarship Fund at the
University of Alberta for archival research on Malawian social history at
Oxford, England
Supervised Students
Ayalah Aylyn
Kara Granzow
Habiba Mohamud
Irene Shankar
Melanie Beres
Ellen Whiteman
Additional Information
Professional Service
Manuscript reviewer for the journals
American Journal of Sociology
Social Problems
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Demography and Social Science and Medicine
Co-ordinator of panels on health and on ageing for the 8th World Congress on Women, Kampala, Uganda, July 2001.