Drivers of India's HIV/AIDS epidemic: Culture-centered co-constructions with long-distance truck drivers
Abstract
This study seeks to understand localized meanings of health and the communication practices around HIV/AIDS among long-distance truck drivers in India. Long-distance truck drivers, or "truckers" have been identified as a "bridge population": a high-risk group for the transmission of HIV/AIDS in India, responsible for transmitting the virus from a core of high-risk groups to the general population. Accordingly, health interventions have employed behavior-change communication and persuasion-based campaigns to spread awareness of transmission, increase condom usage, HIV/AIDS screening among truckers. Silenced in this discourse are the voices, opinions and health agendas of truckers themselves. My study calls for bringing truck drivers at the forefront of health interventions targeting them. This study locates itself in the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach to health communication, wherein meanings of health are theorized at the interstices of localized articulations of cultural meanings, structural processes and the innate human agency to resist. Taking from the culture-centered approach the spirit of co-construction, my ten-week fieldwork with long-distance truckers employed ethnographic methods of data collection like interviews (n=36), reflexive journaling and note taking. Through the data that emerged from my interviews, I learn that truck drivers construct highly complex etiologies and meanings of health and HIV/AIDS through localized articulations of cultural meanings of sexuality and identity, structural barriers and enablers to health, and the agency of marginalized groups to resist the structures that challenge their health and the health of their family. Migration and the responsibility towards one's family emerge as significant organizing principles around which meanings of health, risk, and HIV/AIDS are constructed. My research contributes to the existing literature on theorizing and praxis in health communication in attending to these locally-grounded, co-constructed ways in which communication around HIV/AIDS is centered within the long-distance truck driver community.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Dutta, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Communication|Epidemiology
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