Editorial: Doing Critical Health Communication: A Forum on Methods

The assumed premise of health communication research is straightforward: improving communication processes across all health-related domains. Communication between providers and patients, public health messaging, health literacy training, culturally competent healthcare, health status sharing in families, workplaces, and small groups can all fit within the broad definition of health communication. However, philosophical differences in what communication means–or for that matter, what health means–result in a complex, multi-paradigmatic field of study. For instance, viewing communication primarily as information transfer leads to a different trajectory of research and scholarship than a view of communication as the constitutive process of meaning making. Similarly, conceptualizing health as a means of achieving social concordance or even control vs. as a site of social struggle leads us different places. Within the well-established field of health communication, a preponderance of published research continues to be rooted in communication models that derive from social psychology and information science. Consequently, emerging issues, new theoretical and methodological directions, and ethical challenges define the landscape of the field. For instance, we have witnessed a significant rise in interpretive research focusing on the social construction of meaning. However, we believe there is more work to do in nurturing critical health communication [CHC] perspectives. The primary rationale for this research topic was to describe multiple ways to engage in CHC methodologies through a set of short, “how-to” articles. The original impetus were two roundtable panels (convened at successive National Communication Association conventions) to gauge the trajectory of CHC in the decade after Zoller and Kline’s review of the contributions of interpretive/ critical health communication research in the Annals of Communication (then called Communication Yearbook). One of the things we recognized in those panel discussions was that CHC was still considered a niche sub-discipline or area within health communication, and consequently, students and young scholars who were interested in CHC often did not receive formal guidance in this area, notwithstanding the dramatic increases in CHC-fueled work being published in our disciplinary journals, and/or presented at conferences. Even for scholars familiar with the intellectual terrains of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, the “linguistic turn,” hermeneutics, phenomenology and critical theory, there was a gap in documenting these theoretical concepts into concrete ways of “doing” health communication research. In calling for papers, we urged potential authors to ask, “What makes your work critical?”How do methodological practices illuminate the role of critique? What are the ontological and epistemological implications of doing CHC? How is CHC related to critical praxis? How does “doing” critical work engage with/deviate from the broader interpretive move toward discourses/ Edited and reviewed by: Rukhsana Ahmed, University at Albany, United States