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

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.

Centering the Margins: The Precarity of Bangladeshi Low-Income Migrant Workers During the Time of COVID-19.

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 worked on overcoming the adversities? In doing so, we have closely examined 85 Facebook Pages (number of subscribers: 10,000-1 million), dedicated to issues of Bangladeshi migrant workers to qualitatively analyze emerging mediated discourses (textual, visual, and audiovisual). Our analysis reveals several aspects, including, (1) impact of job insecurities on migrants and their families, (2) living conditions of and abuses on migrants works, (3) negotiations of mental stress by the marginalized migrants, and (4) how community support helps the migrants to survive during the pandemic.

Labor, Health, and Marginalization: A Culture-Centered Analysis of the Challenges of Male Bangladeshi Migrant Workers in the Middle East.

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 exploitative practices. Specifically, the participants articulate the absence of substantive health and labor protections that result in poor health outcomes for them.

Soil salinity detection from satellite image analysis: an integrated approach of salinity indices and field data.

This paper attempts to detect soil salinity from satellite image analysis using remote sensing and geographic information system. Salinity intrusion is a common problem for the coastal regions of the world. Traditional salinity detection techniques by field survey and sampling are time-consuming and expensive. Remote sensing and geographic information system offer economic and efficient salinity detection, monitoring, and mapping. To predict soil salinity, an integrated approach of salinity indices and field data was used to develop a multiple regression equation. The correlations between different indices and field data of soil salinity were calculated to find out the highly correlated indices. The best regression model was selected considering the high R (2) value, low P value, and low Akaike's Information Criterion. About 20% variation was observed between the field data and predicted EC from the satellite image analysis. The precision of this salinity detection technique depends on the accuracy and uniform distribution of field data.

Health at the margins of migration: culture-centered co-constructions among Bangladeshi immigrants.

Increasingly, health scholars have been paying attention to the health experiences of immigrant communities, particularly in the backdrop of the increasing global flows of goods, services, and people across borders. In spite of the increasing public health emphasis on health outcomes of immigrants within the United States, 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 United States. It is against this backdrop then that the co-constructions of experiences of health among immigrants offer an entry point for understanding the intersections of migration and health, particularly as these intersections offer guidance for the development of culturally situated policies and programs. Based on the culture-centered approach, we seek to understand how low-income Bangladeshi immigrants in New York City, who live at the borders of mainstream American society, define, construct, and negotiate health issues through co-constructions of their localized experiences of health.

A culture-centered exploration of health: constructions from rural Bangladesh.

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.