Critical Health Communication

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.

“Critical scholars approach compassion not as sentiment but as praxis—analytically and ethically interrogating the conditions that shape human suffering. This volume confronts the silences and inequalities that perpetuate systemic harm in health contexts, asking: Why do we accept such injustice? And how can we, as scholars and practitioners, demand and enact something better?”Elaine Hsieh, University of Minnesota, USA“Critical Health Communication: Theory and Practice explores how power, politics, and culture are entwined in all aspects of current health communication research, filling a much-needed gap in understanding current health issues. Bridging patients, professionals, and policy, it reveals the urgent need for conducting critical research to transform health communication—and ultimately, health outcomes—worldwide.”Kathryn Greene, Rutgers University, USA

• 1. From Symptoms to Transformation: Addressing the Root Causes of Hunger through Critical Health Communication 2. Reproductive Injustice, Feminicides, and the Intersections of Critical Health Communication and Journalism Praxis 3. God, country, and family: A risk orders theory approach to deconstructing health messages about family planning in the Latine community 4. Communicating Structural Violence: A Case Study of Entertainment Establishment Women Workers in Kathmandu, Nepal 5. Critical Pragmatism and the Politics of the Possible: Communicating for Critically Holistic Health in the Workplace and Beyond 6. HIV interventions, collectivization efforts, and citizenship on the margins of the state in India 7. Navigating the Terrain: Applying Critical Health Communication Methods to Participatory Action Praxis with Black Women Farmers 8. Biocriticism in a Time of Precarity: Inventional Resources for Critical Health Communication 9. Culture-centered Approach as Critical Health Practice: The Body as Resistance 10. Decolonizing Health Communication: Reflections on Critical Health Communication Research in Nigeria 11. Journeys in critical health communication: meditations on being/becoming CCA scholars 12. New Light: Critical Health Communication and Connections to Experiences from the Field