“Doing” Critical Health Communication. A Forum on Methods

Abstract

This Research Topic is intended to be a shared forum for discussion and reflection on the challenges and opportunities of “doing” of critical health communication research. By critical health communication (CHC), we refer to trajectories of communication and allied scholarship that interrogate how meanings and enactments of health are tied to issues of power through the systematic construction and maintenance of inequalities, linked with culture, resources, and social structures. We seek to bring together researchers that identify as critical health communication (CHC) scholars, or those who do critical health communication research (broadly defined), in an effort to engage the various methodological/epistemological perspectives that guide methods in this area. We envisage this Research Topic as a “how-to” for CHC, an attempt to showcase the robust intellectual diversity and multiple paradigmatic influences that constitute CHC broadly. In 2008, Zoller and Kline published a comprehensive review of the contributions of interpretive/critical health communication research in the Annals of Communication (then called Communication Yearbook). In it, the authors documented the popularity of interpretive/critical health research, arguing that these research paradigms have become more

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