1st Edition
Health Communication for Social Justice A Whole Person Activist Approach
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.
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Selected Abbreviations
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
Biography
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.
“Health Communication for Social Justice: A Whole Person Activist Approach resonates with and inspires readers of all scholarly backgrounds. Dr. Vinita Agarwal conceptualizes health and its effective communication in terms of urgent health crises, the lived experiences of health inequity, and the necessity of advocacy.”
Robin E. Jensen, University of Utah, USA
“Health Communication for Social Justice: A Whole Person Activist Approach is a much needed, timely, and cutting-edge comprehensive textbook that centralizes the logic of diversity, equity, and inclusion in studying communication processes of health, health-care, and wellbeing in the post-pandemic Era. This is a must-buy book!”
Shinsuke Eguchi, University of New Mexico, USA
“Enduring and emergent health disparities necessitate an approach that recognizes the multi-faceted nature of being and doing health and commits to positive change. The Whole Person, Social Justice Activist Approach provided herein is a much-needed and integral read for students interested in health across disciplines.”
Charee M. Thompson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
“Health Communication for Social Justice: A Whole Person Activist Approach provides important and necessary perspectives on health communication in an increasingly-diverse and rapidly-changing global society.”
James O. Olufowote, University of Oklahoma, USA
“This is a unique textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in the sense that it offers a nuanced approach to understanding health from a wholistic perspective while highlighting the ways in which health plays out for those living at the margins of our society. Theorists and practitioners will find this an invaluable resource.”
Ambar Basu, University of South Florida, USA
