Construction And Dissemination Of Injury And Pain Experience

Based on the field research lasted half a year in two provinces of Guizhou and Chongqing, the study gathered more than 500,000 words research data of industrial injury illness narratives from 34 farm-workers returning home after industrial injury and their family members, including several narrative styles of oral story, diary, work record, speech and media report.Taking the multiplicity of illness experience as theory frame and using the bottom-up qualitative analysis method, this essay explored the types of industrial injury illness narratives, revealed how industrial-injured farm-workers returning home construct the health discourse of industrial injury and ideology behind it. Other more, the study discussed their illness narration situations and tried to find the functions of illness narration.The study found three main types of illness narratives: Chaos narrative, Multiplicity of Illness narrative and Resistance narrative, which explained the multiplicities of industrial injury in person, culture and politics. Chaos narrative described the complex illness experiences, which mean more than body pain or incomplete, but also series of destruction of life process. Multiplicity of Illness narrative posed an opinion of “social production of industrial injury illness” by outlining kinds of social power structure relations, such as culture, capital production, health care and policy, which exerted on the bodies of industrial injured farm-workers returning home. Resistance narrative told a story about industrial injured farm-workers’ fight practices in daily lives that included body control, protest through ideology communication and establishing new philosophy of life. The above three main types of narratives themselves constituted a confrontation discourse, which formed a discourse of bottom belonging to the group of industrial injured farm-workers returning home to fight against mainstream discourse about body and industrial injury.Second, this research introduced a concept named “narration situation” and concluded four obviously illness narration situations: family silence, communicating with similar people, narration for up class and self-communication. The author analyzed industrial injury illness narrations’ features, motivations and content differences in different situations.Finally, this essay respectively took Huimin NGO and a representative of industrial injured farm-worker returning home named Xiaoying as research objects to deeply study illness narratives’ communication functions for industrial injured farm-workers returning home: Community construction and Health empowerment. At first, industrial injury illness narratives in Huimin group connected every farm-workers returning home after injury and formed a community filled of trust and belongingness. The community based on illness narratives extended into their daily survival to provide them the most important social supports for better lives. Secondly, the function of health empowerment for Xiaoying reflected in below three aspects: social mobilization of health resource, reconstruction of social relations and promotion of social identity and self-identity, which supported her to cope with industrial injury and prevail it.2.7 Hundred million migrant workers are very important in the process of economic construction and social development. However, their voices of body injury don’t be heard by most people in society, so this study has great realistic significance to focus on their illness narratives of industrial injury. Otherwise, this essay fills up the blank of illness narrative study in health communication area in China.