This textbook combines whole person and social justice perspectives to educate students on the role of communication in promoting inclusive and person-centered healthcare practices. This book explores health inequities experienced by disadvantaged and marginalized populations and outlines the actions students can take to address these challenges. The book demonstrates how physical, mental, and emotional health is connected to equitable understandings of individual, community, and environmental health. It considers how social, interpersonal, and systemic factors such as personal relationships, language, literacy, religion, technology, and the environment affect health equity. To present strategies and invite action to support the goals of the whole person, social justice activist approach, the book provides contemporary examples, interviews with communication scholars, and case studies that examine local communities and the everyday contexts of health meaning making. This textbook serves as a core or supplemental text for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in health communication. Online resources include PowerPoint slides and an instructor manual containing sample syllabi, assignments, and test questions. They are available online at www.routledge.com/9781032081038.

Presents studies that promote public dialogue and discussion and that demonstrate how communication consulting can be used to accomplish needed social change. This volume, along with the other volume, shows how scholars have engaged in communication activism to assist individuals, groups, organizations, and communities to secure social reform.

This textbook is an advanced introduction to quantitative methods for students in communication and allied social science disciplines that focuses on why and how to conduct research that contributes to social justice. Today’s researchers are inspired by the potential for scholarship to make a difference for society, to push toward more just and equitable ends, and to engage in dialogue with members of the public so that they can make decisions about how to navigate the social, cultural, and political world equipped with accurate, fair, and up-to-date knowledge. This book illustrates the mechanics and the meaning behind quantitative research methods by illustrating each step in the research design process with research addressing questions of social justice. It provides practical guidance for researchers who wish to engage in the transformation of structures, practices, and understandings in society through community and civic engagement and policy formation. It contains step-by-step guidance in quantitative methods—from conceptualization through all the stages of execution of a study, including providing a detailed guide for statistical analysis—and demonstrates how researchers can engage with social justice issues in systematic, rigorous, ethical, and meaningful ways. This text serves as a core or supplementary textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in research methods for communication and social sciences and fills a gap for a methods text that is responsive to the desire of scholars to conduct socially impactful research.

How and why the idea of wellness holds such rhetorical—and harmful—power. In Why Wellness Sells, Colleen Derkatch examines why the concept of wellness holds such rhetorical power in contemporary culture. Public interest in wellness is driven by two opposing philosophies of health that cycle into and amplify each other: restoration, where people use natural health products to restore themselves to prior states of wellness; and enhancement, where people strive for maximum wellness by optimizing their body's systems and functions. Why Wellness Sells tracks the tension between these two ideas of wellness across a variety of sources, including interviews, popular and social media, advertising, and online activism. Derkatch examines how wellness manifests across multiple domains, where being "well" means different things, ranging from a state of pre-illness to an empowered act of good consumer-citizenship, from physical or moral purification to sustenance and care, and from harm reduction to optimization. Along the way, Derkatch demonstrates that the idea of wellness may promise access to the good life, but it serves primarily as a strategy for coping with a devastating and overwhelming present. Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine, the health and medical humanities, and related fields, Derkatch offers a nuanced account of how language, belief, behavior, experience, and persuasion collide to produce and promote wellness, one of the most compelling—and harmful—concepts that govern contemporary Western life. She explains that wellness has become so pervasive in the United States and Canada because it is an ever-moving, and thus unachievable, goal. The concept of wellness entrenches an individualist model of health as a personal responsibility, when collectivist approaches would more readily serve the health and well-being of whole populations.

The Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Population Health Improvement brings together individuals and organizations that represent different sectors in a dialogue about what is needed to improve population health. On September 22, 2014, the roundtable held a workshop to discuss some of the science of health communication, audiences, and messaging, and to explore what it will take to generate widespread awareness, acceptance, and action to improve health, including through the entertainment media, the news media, and social media. This report summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the volume includes state-of-the-art theories that can be applied to health communication interventions and practical guidelines about how to design, implement, and evaluate effective health communication interventions.

International in scope, The Handbook of Global Health Communication offers a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the role of communication processes in global public health, development and social change Brings together 32 contributions from well-respected scholars and practitioners in the field, addressing a wide range of communication approaches in current global health programs Offers an integrated view that links communication to the strengthening of health services, the involvement of affected communities in shaping health policies and improving care, and the empowerment of citizens in making decisions about health Adopts a broad understanding of communication that goes beyond conventional divisions between informational and participatory approaches

Social factors have a powerful influence on human health and longevity. Yet the social dimensions of health are often obscured in public discussions due to the overwhelming focus in health policy on medical care, individual-level risk factor research, and changing individual behaviours. Likewise, in philosophical approaches to health and social justice, the debates have largely focused on rationing problems in health care and on personal responsibility. However, a range of events over the past two decades such as the study of modern famines, the global experience of HIV/AIDS, the international women’s health movement, and the flourishing of social epidemiological research have drawn attention to the robust relationship between health and broad social arrangements. In Health Justice, Sridhar Venkatapuram takes up the problem of identifying what claims individuals have in regard to their health in modern societies and the globalized world. Recognizing the social bases of health and longevity, Venkatapuram extends the ‘Capabilities Approach’ of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum into the domain of health and health sciences. In so doing, he formulates an inter-disciplinary argument that draws on the natural and social sciences as well as debates around social justice to argue for every human being’s moral entitlement to a capability to be healthy. An ambitious integration of the health sciences and the Capabilities Approach, Health Justice aims to provide a concrete ethical grounding for the human right to health, while advancing the field of health policy and placing health at the centre of social justice theory. With a foreword by Sir Michael Marmot, chair of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health.

This book examines the discourse of a "post-AIDS" culture, and the medical-discursive shift from crisis and death to survival and living. Contributions from a diverse group of international scholars interrogate and engage with the cultural, social, political, scientific, historical, global, and local consumptions of the term "post-AIDS" from the perspective of meaning-making on health, illness, and well-being. The chapters critique and connect meanings of "post-AIDS" to topics such as neoliberalism; race, gender, and advocacy; disclosure; relationships and intimacy; stigma and structural violence; family and community; migration; work; survival; normativity; NGOs, transnational organizations; aging and end-of-life care; the politics of ART and PrEP; mental illness; campaigns; social media; and religion. Using a range of methodological tools, the scholarship herein asks how "post-AIDS" or the "End of the Epidemic" is communicated and made sense of in everyday discourse, what current meanings are circulated and consumed on and around HIV and AIDS, and provides thorough commentary and critique of a "post-AIDS" time. This book will be an essential read for scholars and students of health communication, sociology of health and illness, medical humanities, political science, and medical anthropology, as well as for policy makers and activists.