Co-creating spaces for positive transformative change: Health and HIV/AIDS outcomes for the indigenous people of Koraput

Lalatendu Acharya, Purdue University

Abstract

This study, a work in progress, grounded in the culture centered approach seeks to understand and critically examine the experiences of health and HIV/AIDS among the tribals in Koraput, Orissa and co-create spaces of positive transformative change for improving their health and HIVAIDS outcomes. The tribal and indigenous population across the world are marginalized and their voices erased and absent from mainstream HIVAIDS and health discourses. They are the targeted subjects of numerous health and HIVAIDS campaigns and interventions which construct them as primitive, ignorant audiences with harmful behavioral practices and then seek to educate them in the modern methods of contraception like using condoms and bringing them under surveillance by regular HIVAIDS testing. The tribal populations of Koraput are victims of the same scenario where the agency and voice of the tribals are erased in the construction and implementation of the health and HIVAIDS campaigns. So, my study rewrites on the erasures by foregrounding the tribal voices and co-creating spaces with my tribal participants for improving their health and HIVAIDS outcomes. By foregrounding the tribal voices my study also questions their absence from mainstream health discourses and places the tribal experiences alongside the narratives from the dominant health and HIVAIDS planners thus demonstrating intersections and departures between dominant discourses and tribal experiences. My study is grounded and guided by the framework of a culture centered approach to health communication which provides the theoretical lens and the means to interrogate the absence of the tribal voices and most importantly the space to listen and foreground those voices and co-create spaces of change. I conducted this study over 45 days in the tribal populated district of Koraput in Orissa, a state in eastern India. With the aim of establishing a space of solidarity and participation with the tribal cultural participant, I conducted 44 one to one single interviews and group discussions combined with the tribal participants and 23 one on one interviews with health service providers and NGO workers working in the district on health and HIVAIDS issues. My data consisted of the interview transcripts plus my own journal notes and reflexive memos. The study informed me that the tribal population had their own cosmology which shaped their agency to negotiate multiple meanings of health as a part of their daily lived experience. This daily negotiation also made them take conscious decisions regarding their health choices with the lack of structural resources. The tribal participants responded to the discussions of HIVAIDS with stigma, silences and denial which were in many ways a resistive act towards the larger marginalizing discourses and also towards my researcher's inquiring gaze. The voices of the tribal participants indicated that they are not ignorant but rather very much aware of the safe and unsafe behaviors but enact their agency in a dynamic relationship with the lack of structural resources and other constraints. The spaces that we co-created in the interactions told me that the cultural participant needed much support in increasing/ facilitating their access to structural resources. My study through these engaged understandings informs theory and praxis that tribal populations should not be constructed as an ignorant, illiterate mass in need for enlightenment, they should be given access to structural resources and their voice should be given an adequate representation/ space in the dominant health communication arena.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Dutta, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication|Public health|South Asian Studies

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