Raihan Jamil | University of LIberal Arts Bangladesh (original) (raw)

Papers by Raihan Jamil

The International Encyclopedia of Health Communication, Sep 29, 2022

Health Communication, May 1, 2012

The traditional approach in health communication has historically adopted a linear model to explo... more The traditional approach in health communication has historically adopted a linear model to explore and study health, without considering the voices of the subaltern sectors in academic discourse. Such linear models prescribe one-way knowledge, information, and transmission of beliefs from the core health sectors to the subalterns at the margins. The culture-centered approach to health focuses on co-constructing meanings of health through dialogic engagement with communities that are situated at the margins of mainstream discursive spaces. This co-constructive research investigates how members of a Bangladeshi rural community define, construct, and negotiate health issues in their everyday lives through their narratives of health, illness, and healing. The findings explicate how the community participants negotiate their health in terms of poverty, work, and structure, and highlights how the participants negotiate their marginalization through communicative practices. The in-depth narratives on their construction of health underscore possible entry points into constructing culture-centered praxis, pointing toward spaces of change. Karimana 1 is a woman in her early thirties who lives in a remote village of Bangladesh. She and her husband have seven children. Karimana sometimes does part-time work here and there, and does not have any education at all. She wants to work more and contribute toward her family income and needs, but cannot find work. Money is extremely tight in her family and being sick is not an option for her or her seven children or her husband. She rarely goes to see a doctor, she says, and only does so when she is "really, really sick and can manage some money" for the doctor's fees. Her core belief about illness, perhaps because of her struggles and limitations in life, is that God gives illness and if HE wants to cure it, HE will, and otherwise there is nothing much one can do about it. Karimana is not alone in her situation in life, and there are many others like her in rural Bangladesh who articulate the meanings of health in the backdrop of poverty 1 All names used in this article have been changed to protect the respondents' identities, although, none of them had any objection about using their own names.

The International Encyclopedia of Health Communication, Sep 29, 2023

Defining rural health It is common to visualize a serene landscape with miles of green all around... more Defining rural health It is common to visualize a serene landscape with miles of green all around, rivers and streams flowing by, and birds singing under a bright blue sky whenever we hear about a location that has the term "rural" in front of it. However, leaving aside the romanticism of this term in popular culture, "rural" has no globally accepted definition, and may vary within countries as well. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), rural regions are defined primarily based on population density (less than 150 people/sq. km) and the percentage of people (more than 50%) living in rural communities (Strasser, Kam, & Regalado, 2016). Additionally, the term "rural" is used to talk about land development, modern constructions, non-urban areas, distance from major cities, labor market dependency, access to resources, and so on. It is this access to resources-more specifically, lack of access to health resources-that broadly defines and characterizes rural health. Underneath this broad stroke of resource access limitation are the experiential realities of health disparity, insufficient resources, fragmented delivery of service, shortage of clinicians, higher rates of some chronic illnesses, cancer, and limited health insurance (Bianco & Harter, 2014). Because of many of these similar health barriers, sometimes rural health is interchanged with Indigenous health. But that is not the case. The life, living, and health of Indigenous people are profoundly stained by colonization, which had a powerful impact on Indigenous people, their lands, and their ways of life. There are between 370 and 500 million Indigenous people in the world whose lives were upended at some point by colonization that negatively affected their mental, physical, emotional, social, and economic well-being. This specific context fundamentally differentiates Indigenous health needs and communication from rural ones. Importance of rural health Increasingly, scholars and practitioners from across the globe are expressing concern about the health scenario in rural spaces, especially in the Global South. International institutions and their initiatives such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations have paid close attention to health disparities in the underserved

The International Encyclopedia of Health Communication

$Research paper thumbnail of Marginalization and health: Patients\u27 voices from a Bangladeshi public hospital$

This is a co-scripted project that aims to understand the localized constructions of health, agen... more This is a co-scripted project that aims to understand the localized constructions of health, agency, and spaces for transformative changes in a community that is primarily based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Research was conducted with a community of patients who frequent the most renowned public hospital of Bangladesh. Being socially marginalized, the voices of this community are primarily absent from the dominant discourses on health, health care, and health policy development. Theoretically and methodologically grounded in the culture-centered approach to health communication, this research focused on foregrounding the voices of the community participants by listening to their narratives and stories of their experiences. The culture-centered approach was chosen as the theoretical lens for this study. Over a period of two months, I conducted 34 in-depth interviews, and wrote field notes and reflexive journal entries. The study revealed a complex construction of health by the community par...

Media Watch, Apr 8, 2022

There has been an enormous growth of TV channels in Bangladesh. As a result, TV news has become v... more There has been an enormous growth of TV channels in Bangladesh. As a result, TV news has become very popular among other programs. This study attempted to explore the variations in the perceived credibility of TV news in Bangladesh and how the joint distribution of constructs explaining credibility is affected by different demographic groups. The study concludes that gender and education level significantly impact overall credibility perceptions.

The purpose of this study is to provide recommendations to bridging the "theoretical" w... more The purpose of this study is to provide recommendations to bridging the "theoretical" with the "practical" in developing community-based participatory research (CBPR) health communication projects. As illustrated through a review of several case studies from health campaigns using CBPR, often times the theoretical orientations of CBPR become secondary to its praxis, with unspoken motives and agendas become motivating factors in guiding the initiatives. These motives may come in the form of funding organization priorities, funded grant proposal constraints, and the desire to continue relationships that are fostered in the development of CBPR projects. In response, this essay reintroduces the culture-centered approach (CCA) as an additional metatheoretical lens that can be utilized in linking theory to practice. The use of specific reflexive exercises are recommended to draw out unseen power differentials within project partnerships, calling into question the funda...

Encyclopedia of Health Communication

Supplemental material, Interview_Guide_-_Migrant_Health_-_March_7_2020 for Labor, Health, and Mar... more Supplemental material, Interview_Guide_-_Migrant_Health_-_March_7_2020 for Labor, Health, and Marginalization: A Culture-Centered Analysis of the Challenges of Male Bangladeshi Migrant Workers in the Middle East by Rati Kumar and Raihan Jamil in Qualitative Health Research

American Behavioral Scientist

A global outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) has profoundly escalated social, political, economic,... more A global outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) has profoundly escalated social, political, economic, and cultural disparities, particularly among the marginalized migrants of the global South, who historically remained key sufferers from such disparities. Approximately 8 million, such workers from Bangladesh, migrated from their homelands to work in neighboring countries, specifically in Southeast Asia and in the Middle East, and also contribute significantly to their country’s economy. As many of the migrant workers work on temporary visas, scholars have expressed concerns about their physical and psychological health such as joblessness, mortality, abuses, daunting stress, and inhabitable living environment. Embracing the theoretical frameworks of critical–cultural communication, this article explores two research questions: (1) What are the emerging narratives of experiencing realities and disparities among the Bangladeshi migrants at the margins? (2) How the migrants negotiated and...

Qualitative Health Research

Based on the culture-centered approach, we examine the meanings of health and negotiations of hea... more Based on the culture-centered approach, we examine the meanings of health and negotiations of health care structures among low socioeconomic status (SES) Bangladeshi male migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). We engage in coconstructive problem definition and strategizing through 44 semistructured in-depth interviews/focus groups about health, migration, and well-being. Our analysis of the participants’ narratives elucidates the intersectionality of health as a lived experience of migrant labor within neoliberal structures focused on labor extraction, highlighting health not as a static or purely epidemiological construct, but as a combination of the physical, mental, spiritual, and socioeconomic material realities within which they are located. These include a recognition of the importance of interconnectedness of physical and mental well-being, drawing upon one’s cultural and familial roles and responsibilities, as well as locating health within structurally exploitat...