Global and Cultural Issues in Health Communication

Catalog description

This course explores global health related issues, and their cultural and communicative implications at the interpersonal, organizational, institutional, and cultural levels. Students develop awareness of the complex and interrelated issues that influence community health and well-being around the world with a particular focus on vulnerable populations. Drawing from cultural, historical, social, and ethical meanings of health and illness, students develop leadership skills and cultivate cultural communicative competence for the global health environment. Students investigate a range of health-related topics including narrative medicine, health equity, health risk and crisis, cultural meaning of health and risk, social construction and communication of health risk, media representations of global health issues, and social justice and global health. This course reflects the assumption that communication constitutes issues, relationships, and contexts relevant to global health. Communication is the fundamental human meaning-making endeavor, shaping health related experiences from the micro to the macro levels of interaction in diverse cultural settings.