Health Communication for Social Justice

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.

Vinita Agarwal is Professor of Communication at Salisbury University, USA. She is the founder of Whole Person Health Consulting, LLC, and the author of Medical Humanism, Chronic Illness, and the Body in Pain (2020). Her work has appeared in journals, including Health Communication, Journal of Advanced Nursing, and Journal of American College Health, and the International Encyclopedia of Health Communication.

Section I: Conceptualizing Health 1. A Whole Person Framework of Health 2. Models for Representing Health and Disease 3. A Social Justice Activist Approach to Health Section II: Constructing Health 4. Evolving Understandings of Health 5. Healthcare Relationships 6. Healthcare Systems 7. Health Literacy Section III: Contextualizing Health 8. Health and the Environment 9. Technology and Health 10. Religion and Health 11. Global Health