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HIV-AIDS research hits home for graduate
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October 5, 2004
Laura Cooper's PhD thesis has been hailed as a remarkable discourse on living with HIV-AIDS.
But she says it's equally remarkable that she ever completed a thesis at all. “It's been a long struggle,” says Cooper, who receives her PhD during SFU's fall convocation ceremony Oct. 7. “My son was four when I started college,” in 1986, “and now he's in university himself.”
Cooper began her academic journey promisingly with an arts diploma and a Governor General's medal for outstanding academic performance at East Kootenay Community College. She completed her bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees at SFU.
But along the way, she has endured a seemingly endless string of family crises that would derail all but the most resilient students. They include the 1987 disappearance of her father, presumed drowned, her sister Alex Keating's 1989 HIV diagnosis, her brother-in-law James Keating's HIV infection, her own battle with cancer in 1995 and her mother's death from cancer in 1996.
Cooper, a single mother, teaches anthropology at Kwantlen University College. Given her life's emotional demands she virtually abandoned her PhD goal. Her academic supervisor Marilyn Gates provided encouragement. “We created a very powerful collaborative ethnographic narrative of my sister's life experience with HIV,” says Cooper, “and how her story constitutes a counter story against a lot of the stereotypes and stigmas associated to persons infected with HIV.”
Cooper's ethnography -- a format using anthropological practices and field research techniques to study people's daily lives -- is experimental in several respects, not least being the full participation of her sister.
Cooper says the research represents a deeply personal product of the lives of two siblings that has left them closer than ever and changed by the experience.
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(digital photo available)
But she says it's equally remarkable that she ever completed a thesis at all. “It's been a long struggle,” says Cooper, who receives her PhD during SFU's fall convocation ceremony Oct. 7. “My son was four when I started college,” in 1986, “and now he's in university himself.”
Cooper began her academic journey promisingly with an arts diploma and a Governor General's medal for outstanding academic performance at East Kootenay Community College. She completed her bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees at SFU.
But along the way, she has endured a seemingly endless string of family crises that would derail all but the most resilient students. They include the 1987 disappearance of her father, presumed drowned, her sister Alex Keating's 1989 HIV diagnosis, her brother-in-law James Keating's HIV infection, her own battle with cancer in 1995 and her mother's death from cancer in 1996.
Cooper, a single mother, teaches anthropology at Kwantlen University College. Given her life's emotional demands she virtually abandoned her PhD goal. Her academic supervisor Marilyn Gates provided encouragement. “We created a very powerful collaborative ethnographic narrative of my sister's life experience with HIV,” says Cooper, “and how her story constitutes a counter story against a lot of the stereotypes and stigmas associated to persons infected with HIV.”
Cooper's ethnography -- a format using anthropological practices and field research techniques to study people's daily lives -- is experimental in several respects, not least being the full participation of her sister.
Cooper says the research represents a deeply personal product of the lives of two siblings that has left them closer than ever and changed by the experience.
-30-
(digital photo available)