A decade-long study of young adulthood in Malawi that demonstrates the impact of widespread HIV status uncertainty, laying bare the sociological implications of what is not known.

An Epidemic of Uncertainty advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasizing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–what people know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as an entry point, Jenny Trinitapoli shows that despite admirable declines in new HIV infections and AIDS-related mortality, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, fully half of Malawian young adults don’t know their HIV status. Reckoning with the impact of this uncertainty within the bustling trading town of Balaka, Trinitapoli argues that HIV-related uncertainty is measurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions, with consequences that expand into multiple domains of life, including relationship stability, fertility, and health. Over the duration of a groundbreaking decade-long longitudinal study, rich survey data and poignant ethnographic vignettes vividly depict how individual lives and population patterns unfold against the backdrop of an ever-evolving epidemic. Even as HIV is transformed from a progressive, fatal disease to a chronic and manageable condition, the accompanying epidemic of uncertainty remains fundamental to understanding social life in this part of the world.

Insisting that known unknowns can and should be integrated into social-scientific models of human behavior, An Epidemic of Uncertainty treats uncertainty as an enduring aspect, a central feature, and a powerful force in everyday life.
 

"An Epidemic of Uncertainty is dense and thorough in its engagement with the TLT study, interspersed with detailed ethnographic vignettes that give stories, names, and weight to the vast data collected and examined." - The Lancet

""An Epidemic of Uncertainty is a multicourse gourmet meal for demographers. It is a book to settle into, chew on, and ruminate over with good friends. Empirically dense, theoretically rich, and analytically smart, the book moves the reader effortlessly between sophisticated quantitative analyses and everyday village and town life in and around Balaka, Malawi. And it brings demography, in all its interdisciplinary and conceptual splendor, to bear on the new subfield, Jenny Trinitapoli, the book's author, wants to usher in: Uncertainty Demography."" - Population and Development Review

"The data in the book is rich, innovative, and unveils a deep connection and understanding of the Balaka region in Malawi. Throughout the book, Trinitapoli expertly weaves together historical accounts of shifts in global HIV policy and the local legislative order, broader demographic changes in fertility, mortality, and migration, and data from her own longitudinal studies and ethnographic vignettes, to offer a compelling and complex analysis of the role uncertainty plays in the lives of young adults in contemporary Malawi." - Social Forces