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‘We Were an Afterthought’ : Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities in New South Wales, Australia
Mugumbate, Rugare Gopaldasani, Vinod Kidson, Paul Ravulo, Jioji J.
Mugumbate, Rugare
Gopaldasani, Vinod
Kidson, Paul
Ravulo, Jioji J.
Abstract
This paper investigates the impact on Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities in Australia of government and community responses to the coronavirus pandemic of 2019 in the domains of education, employment, housing, social connectedness, and public health communication. Most of the examples are drawn from the state of New South Wales. In Australia, CALD refers to people from countries not classified as main English speaking. Most CALD communities reported in this article are from refugee backgrounds, are recently arrived migrants or do not use English in most of their communication. Inadequate, and in some instances, inappropriate or absent support, adversely impacts CALD communities. We used a multidisciplinary bricolage approach that draws on media, government, and community support publications and concluded that CALD communities experienced heightened pressures due to lower resource availability and poor communication. This led to disruption of support services, exposing gaps and vulnerability. The results reported here challenge Australian government, schools, community agencies, researchers to include proactively CALD community perspectives when planning and responding to such crises in future. Improving communication, pandemic response planning, addressing needs and ensuring participation are key considerations.
Keywords
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), education, employment, health communication, housing, social connectedness
Date
2024
Type
Journal article
Journal
Book
Volume
39
Issue
6
Page Range
509-521
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Education
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.