“The Lung Disease as an Evanescent Rainbowâ€: Indigenous Languages as Agency in Communicating COVID-19 in Multilingual Kham Tibetan Region in China

Puba and Dongjing Kang

SAGE Open, 2024, vol. 14, issue 4, 21582440241289328

Abstract: The role of language is one of the most critical elements in communicating COVID-19 public health mandates globally. This study aims to explore how Tibetans in the multilingual Kham region came to understand COVID-19 and develop health choices. To accomplish this goal, we used a culture-centered approach to examine how the words/phrases of COVID-19 influence Kham Tibetans’ agency [the ability to develop actions (or lack thereof)] to work on the infectious disease and the pandemic management policy in China. This analysis explores the interactions among social structure, culture, and agency in the creation of transformative practices for negotiating the digital biomedical environment. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with Tibetans in the Kham region, we illustrate that the dialogical praxis to co-construct languages significantly impacts Tibetans’ deliberate agency, the capacity to act that is conscious or intended, to work on COVID-19 and the pandemic-control policy.

Keywords: Tibetan languages; critical intercultural communication; culture-centered approach; health choice; COVID-19 in China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241289328 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:14:y:2024:i:4:p:21582440241289328

DOI: 10.1177/21582440241289328

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().