Culture, Structure, and Health: Narratives of Low-income Bangladeshi Migrant Workers from the United Arab Emirates

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Health Communication

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Abstract

© 2020, © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Increasingly, health scholars are paying attention to the health experiences of immigrant communities, particularly in the backdrop of the global flows of goods, services, and people across borders. In spite of the increasing public health emphasis on health outcomes of immigrants within the Middle Eastern (ME) countries, immigrant communities are often constructed as monoliths and the voices of immigrant communities are traditionally absent from mainstream health policy and program discourses. The health experiences of immigrants, their access to resources, and the health trajectories through the life-course followed by them and their descendants influence the deep-seated patterns of ethnic health disparities documented in the ME. Based on the culture-centered approach, we engaged in in-depth face-to-face interviews, and focus groups discussions with a total of 44 research participants, to understand how low-income Bangladeshi migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who live at the borders of mainstream Arab society, define, construct, and negotiate health issues. Participants articulate in their narratives their nuanced cultural understanding of good health as a complex, holistic practice, the achievement of which is obstructed by barriers such as immigration and insurance structures. Further, they enact their agency in resource impoverished circumstances to protect their mental health and physical well-being through daily strategies and acts of resistance.

ISSN

1041-0236

Publisher

Routledge

Last Page

12

Disciplines

Economics | Medicine and Health Sciences | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

achievement, adult, article, attention, clinical article, controlled study, female, health care policy, health disparity, human, human experiment, immigrant, immigration, insurance, interview, lowest income group, male, mental health, migrant worker, narrative, physical well-being, progeny, public health, United Arab Emirates, voice

Scopus ID

85083784078

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

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