| الوصف: |
Health in your language is a health promoting and disease preventing project, anchored in Prevention Center Nørrebro in the municipality of Copenhagen. This anchored project is targeting ethnic minorities, and the purpose is to reduce social inequality in health for this specific group. The way to do this is by using the competences of so-called health promoters who are also ethnic minorities, via peer education. In the spring of 2014, twelve people of ethnic minority are being educated to function as health promoters. I am in this master thesis combining health promotion and health strategies and cultural encounters, investigating how ethnicity is constructed during the course of the education of the new health promoters, and how these new health promoters are negotiating their position and identity in this particular educational frame. This investigation is based on the theory of science concerning social constructionism and I have conducted the investigation by taking a qualitative approach. Specifically by doing an interview with the project manager for Health in your language and by doing fieldwork including participant observation, during the education of the twelve new health promoters. I found that ethnicity is constructed in three ways, during the education. First ethnicity is constructed by a specific cultural differentiation of the target group, the ethnic minorities, and by the delimitation that this differentiation set for this ethnic group. Second, ethnicity is constructed via a political discourse which says that ethnic minorities are a problem and have problems that need to be solved, because of cultural and linguistic barriers. Third ethnicity is constructed in relation to other social categories. Ethnicity being the primary social category and gender, social class and language being the other social categories in which ethnicity is constructed. The new health promoters negotiate their position and identity based on an internalization of an external categorization of the target group, the ethnic minorities. The external categorization is the aforementioned discourse, which through this internalization becomes part of the health promoters’ group identity, as ethnic minorities themselves. This becomes apparent through several examples throughout the course of the education. The new health promoters also negotiate their position and identity via the assumption made by the educators that they are part of this particular ethnic group and share this group identity. This forces the health promoters to convey the identity of the target group, even though this may not be the case, thus retaining the health promoters in the ethnic group identity. |
