Trial by Fire Posted on January 11, 2008 Margaret R. Weeks (bio) recalls her early experiences as the Director of a NIDA AIDS study.

I was interested in Chinese women post-revolution with the transformations that were happening and also with the long traditional history that they have but in particular in the context of the one-child family policy. So my original research for my dissertation was, again, it was fairly theoretically-oriented. It was not applied research per se, but it gave me a strong background in doing that kind of research. When I finished my degree and began looking for work, first of all anthropology jobs were difficult to come by, and secondly I was somewhat anchored locally after my degree because I had just had a baby and we were settling in.

And so I began to look for something more close to home rather than looking around for whatever positions might be available, and I came upon a community-based applied research institute in Hartford, which was run by an anthropologist. And her training and track record and background was in applied research, community-based collaborative research, and focusing on a variety of topics but including health and education and several other issues.

And I came into a study that right away took me in a very different direction, but not so far afield that it didn’t work. And what I came into was a project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse looking at AIDS risk among drug users in an urban context. So it was a whole new set of literature. It was both from a theoretical and from an applied standpoint.

It was a whole new experience. I was the director of the project, so I was running a five-agency consortium, and the consortium was a group of two organizations that were organized around community research and three that were social service organizations. And so we did this project together, and that was my trial by fire getting into practical and applied anthropology.

Since then I now have worked for 17 or 18 years in AIDS-prevention research with drug users, but I’ve also been able to build on my theoretical approach to gender studies and focus on women’s issues in particular. And about five or six years ago I encountered someone who was doing similar work in China and was focused on AIDS risk among sex workers there. And subsequently we’ve developed a collaborative, a set of collaborative projects and are working on those together. So now I’ve come full circle, and I’m back doing work in China as well, but now in an applied setting and on AIDS-prevention research.

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