“One major method of controlling the pandemic is to teach people to change their behavior,” said Walt Hanclosky, an associate professor of media arts who has brought his professional background to bear in the war on AIDS in Africa where the disease threatens the entire continent.

“The best way to teach people to change their behavior is through education and that’s what we’re doing,” Hanclosky said. Hanclosky will discuss one of the ways young African girls are being taught to avoid the disease in a Sept. 22 colloquium sponsored by the Richard L. Walker Institute of International and Area Studies.

The presentation—a showing and discussion of Hanclosky’s award-winning film, “The Key to the Future”—begins at 3:30 p.m. in Room 430 of Gambrell Hall. It is free and open to the public.

The 16-minute animated video was produced by Hanclosky for the Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organization, a 2.5 million member women’s organization in Kenya.

Also assisting with the project was the USC Media Arts HIV/AIDS Outreach Project; the Department of Art, which provided a software package that art students used to help produce the video; and the Institute for Families in Society at USC.

Muriel Harris, a research professor at the institute, and Peninah Nagi, a native of Kenya who received her Ph.D. in education from USC, were voice actors for the video. Steven Borders, technical director of the Koger Center for the Arts, produced the video’s original background music.

Some of the video’s translation work was performed by students from Columbia International College.

The video’s goal is to teach girls between 9 and 14 to avoid the sexual advances of older men and male students their own age to reduce the spread of HIV.

The video originated as a pictorial book used for several years in Kenya that was originally produced by Johns Hopkins University under a Rockefeller Foundation grant. A new grant proposal is under way from the Global Fund for Women, a U.S.-based agency that funds projects to help women worldwide, to show the video in school systems and on TV stations in Kenya and other sub-Saharan countries.

Hanclosky got involved in the project when he attended the 2001 International HIV Conference in Miami. After giving a presentation on a 1997 interactive CD-ROM he produced on HIV and AIDS in New York City, he was approached by representatives of Kenya who asked him for help with HIV prevention efforts in their country. The 16-minute video was one of the results.

After working on the effort in the United States, the Walker Institute at USC awarded Hanclosky a starter grant to go to Kenya to create other media projects that deal with using art to produce instructional material to teach about HIV-AIDS.

He is now producing instructional materials that deal with poetry, dance, and singing. And he compiled a collection of still images that can be used by various organizations in Kenya.

The video deals with two women who reunite in a court of law after having known each other in childhood. They talk about the different choices they made regarding sexual practices, how one can contract HIV, and how good life can be if people take advantage of recommendations made in the video.

When he was in Kenya last February and March, Hanclosky gave a presentation on creating media to teach cultural issues at the University of Nairobi. It was there he realized “we’re not really just dealing with HIV and AIDS. We’re also dealing with social and cultural issues, and if you deal with how to educate people in regard to HIV, you also need to be able to deal with the whole assortment of associated symptoms of the problem.”

Hanclosky has applied for a Fulbright grant to return to the University of Nairobi where there is a possibility of having journalism and mass communications students collaborate with researchers in the sociology department to create more shows on cultural issues.

The opportunity to teach in Kenya under a Fulbright grant was one of the outcomes of the Walker Institute grant, as was the grant proposal to fund distribution of the 16-minute HIV-AIDS video to school systems and TV stations throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

“There aren’t a whole lot of VCRs and monitors in Africa,” Hanclosky said. “The book that the video is based on reached thousands of young people. When we get the animated video broadcast in different countries on a Saturday morning, we’ll reach tens of thousands.

“Therefore, we can help exponentially.”

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