Overview

Poverty, Gender and Health in the Slums of Bangladesh provides comprehensive ethnographic accounts that depict the daily life experiences and health hardships encountered by young women and their families living in the slums of Dhaka city and the injustices they face. The analysis focuses on two specific historical eras: 2002-2003 and 2020-2022 and shows that despite recent improvements in employment opportunities and greater mobility for young women, their lives reflect ongoing challenges reminiscent of those faced two decades earlier. While national and global organizations acknowledge the nation's economic and social progress, those on the outskirts of society continue to grapple with enduring poverty. They are excluded from the advantages of economic growth, oppressed by unjust local, national, and global systems, discriminatory laws, and policies. Their struggles go unnoticed as they confront a slew of challenges, including slum evictions, enforced lockdowns, income losses, food insecurity, and ongoing crises related to health, injuries, fatalities, and exploitation and harassment by law enforcement and influential individuals within the slum and the city. After two decades, these obstacles persist, and life remains tenuous, with health severely compromised. This book will appeal to students, academics, and researchers in the fields of Public Health, Medical Anthropology, Gender Studies, Urban Studies, Development Studies, Social Sciences, as well as professionals engaged in urban health and poverty-related work.

Full Product Details

9781032740614

Table of Contents

Reviews

""This is an utterly absorbing account of the lives and health of poor women living in Dhaka’s urban slums. It is based on the author’s deep engagement with their lives over two decades and the women’s narratives and their voices still linger in my mind. Professor Rashid has taken the social determinants of health approach and shaken it to its core, showing how the ill-health documented here is rooted in global and national economic, political and gender inequalities. The case for a social justice model of global health has never been better made. This is required reading for every researcher and practitioner working in this field."" -- Hilary Standing, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, U.K. ""This is an unusual book. It inverts the usual academic conventions. It doesn’t foreground theory or give us a lot of statistics. Instead, it gives us an utterly absorbing set of narratives of women and their families living in slum settlements over two time periods, each marked by crisis and uncertainty. [...] The book is compulsively readable and accessible. It’s hard to put down."" -- Sally Theobald, Liverpool School of Tropica Medicine, UK and Hilary Standing, University of Sussex, UK. PLOS BLOGS: Speaking of Medicine and Health, 2024.

Author Information

Sabina Faiz Rashid is Professor and Mushtaque Chowdhury Chair in Health and Poverty of BRAC James P. Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Bangladesh, The position was endowed by the founder of BRAC, the Late Sir Fazle Hasan Abed. She was former Dean of BRAC School (2013-2023). Her research and teaching focuses on urban informal settlement communities, adolescents, and marginalised groups, including refugee populations and sexual minorities in Bangladesh.

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