Critical Health Communication: Theory and Practice

This book offers strong rationales for adopting a critical view of health communication by demonstrating how theories and critical practices can be enriched by foregrounding issues of power, politics, and culture.

In health communication, critical approaches highlight the role of communication in constituting, reinforcing, and resisting inequitable power relations that underlie the sociocultural and structural barriers to well-being. This book highlights the theoretical and practical contributions of critical health communication to allow readers to gain in-depth understanding of the tools and methods required to conduct critical research. It includes a broad array of approaches to health communication scholarship such as rhetorical, feminist, anti-racist, and intersectional perspectives. Chapters present research from a variety of international and local contexts addressing medical and public health challenges and center issues of power, resistance, voice, and social change from marginalized perspectives.

Outlining the centrality of critical approaches to theorizing and practicing health communication in more equitable, ethical, and effective ways, this book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in health communication, critical and cultural communication, as well as other health-related courses.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

Shaunak Sastry is Professor of Communication in the School of Communication, Film, & Media Studies and Provost’s Fellow at the University of Cincinnati, USA. Dr. Sastry is the second Vice-President of the National Communication Association (NCA). His award-winning health communication research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, and he currently is Co-Principal Investigator and co-lead of the Community Engagement Core of the Cincinnati Center for Climate Change and Health. He is also a former Senior Editor of the journal Health Communication and sits on the editorial board of several leading academic journals.

Heather M. Zoller is a Professor in the School of Communication, Film, & Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati, USA. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Communication Research and former Senior Editor at Health Communication. She co-edited Emerging Perspectives in Health Communication: Meaning, Culture, & Power (Routledge, 2008) and serves on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on PPE with NIOSH.

Ambar Basu is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida, USA. He is a co-editor of Post-AIDS Discourse in Health Communication (Routledge, 2021). He has served as Senior Editor for Health Communication, and he co-edits a Routledge book series titled Critical Cultural Studies in Global Health Communication.