Psychosocial Stressors and Ready-Made Garment Industries in Bangladesh:An ethno-epidemiological study of its causes and consequences (Extension)

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Christian Strümpell
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389317187

This is an application for an extension of my current anthropological subproject within the DFG-funded project “Psychosocial Stressors and Bangladesh’s Garment Industry: an ethno-epidemiological study of ist causes and consequences”. This interdisciplinary project focusses on workers’ experience of stress in Bangladesh’s export garment industry to address two major lacunae of established epidemiological models of work stress: their failure to consider, first, the historical-regional specificity of the work contexts they analyse, and second, the embeddedness of these work contexts into social environments beyond the worksite. The project contributes to fill these lacunae by exploring how work in the garment industry in Bangladesh is shaped by the historically specific way the industry is integrated into global commodity chains, and by exploring how workers’ stressful experience of these regimes are as much shaped by their relations with their families in their villages of origin as by their relations with supervisors and co-workers in garment factories. The aim of the anthropological subproject was to explore the garment industry’s global connections, and garment workers’ relations to their families and to their workmates. The extension is required to write up the results of this research in the form of a monograph, as had been the goal of the original proposal.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Bangladesh
• Cooperation Partner: Hasan Ashraf
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Adrian Loerbroks