Age discrimination, long habitual internationally, is now developing into age panic as longevity becomes the norm. People are increasingly living through their 80s and 90s, threatening social systems—not just health care, but also education, transportation, and economics. A by-product of longevity is Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or dementia more broadly, and this the focus of our essay. Five million people in the United States (the greater part women) currently have Alzheimer’s or dementia, and the figure is projected to grow exponentially as the baby boom generation ages. Fear, and other powerful affects, are generated in the aging Eurocentric public through overwhelmingly negative images of dementia. Prominent circulating AD images portray white, middle-class women and men; they are typically cared for by heroic family members, with the occasional, backgrounded appearances of racialized care workers. Such discourses betray a noticeable ageism, together with gendering, racialization, and medicalization of the illness. The reification of neuroscience studies of AD perpetuates understanding of AD subjects as having lost their subjectivity and as a burden to health-care systems. As the politics of care becomes ever more fraught with the increase in numbers of diagnosed elderly people, media discourses take on particular significance. Largely negative, images have obvious implications for long-term care in discourse and in practice. Since improving care depends on how the AD subject is visualized and conceptualized, critical analyses of works dealing with age panic, and especially how it arises in relation to cultural understandings of dementia, are essential. Critiques by humanists and psychologists may contribute to improving care of AD subjects, both in long-term facilities and “in place.” Improved care can contribute to transforming the popular understanding of a dementia crisis, thus addressing the central impetus of age panic. Meanwhile, new films, fiction, memoirs, and graphic arts projects are powerful complements to psychological studies aimed at developing new ways of seeing AD subjects.
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Alzheimer’s, Age Panic, Neuroscience: Media Discourses of Dementia and Care
E. Ann Kaplan and Sally Chivers
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Dis/Ability and Critical Cultural Studies
Diane R. Wiener
While there are many contestations surrounding the significance, meanings, and interpretations of dis/ability in the field of critical cultural studies, the author presents a variety of foundational as well as emergent concepts, structures, and histories in order to situate these debates. The 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 2020, increasingly frequent criticisms of the “sea of whiteness” in disability critique, and an attendant call for equitable attention to intersectional theorization and practice, accompanied by a variety of frameworks, are employed to introduce the relevance of these contestations as well as to equip readers with opportunities to engage and study further.
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Disruption Information Seeking and Processing Model Applied to Health and Risk Messaging
Joshua A. Braun
The disruption information seeking and processing (DISP) model is a variation on the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model. While both the DISP and the original RISP models seek to predict how individuals will search for and attend to information in response to a perceived hazard, DISP aims to broaden analysts’ view of the sorts of information individuals may seek in such situations. It does so by expanding the repertoire of social psychology theory on which the model is constructed to include ideas from the literatures on sensemaking and identity maintenance.
A major argument of DISP is that on many occasions the information that people seek in response to a risk will not be directly related to the risk itself. For example, if you hear a news bulletin on an outbreak of food poisoning associated with ground beef, the next thing you look for may not be information on the risks of E. Coli, but a recipe for chicken. While the observation that people seek non-risk-related information in response to risks is a broad one, the DISP concerns itself with one particularly important aspect of this idea.
Specifically, based on research in the sensemaking and identity maintenance traditions, the DISP model proposes that, for information seekers, the self and the various identities in which individuals are personally invested are often as much the objects in need of interpretation as the hazardous environment. The implication of this is that when faced with a risk, individuals are likely to pay attention not just to information on the risk itself (the sort of information prioritized by RISP), but on the identities impacted by the hazard—for example, how a person’s acceptance of or strategy for coping with the risk might affect her self-image as being a good parent, a conscientious employer, etc.
The DISP also proposes that some hazard situations are likely to be more disruptive to individuals’ sense of self than others—namely instances where the individual has a high vested interest in a particular identity that is challenged by the hazard combined with a low sense of self-efficacy with respect to remediating the hazard. A typical example would be a parent who prides herself on keeping her kids safe, who finds out about an environmental risk to children in her neighborhood, but who cannot afford to move.
According to the DISP model, in such a circumstance the individual would likely become more attuned to information about the countervailing positive aspects of the neighborhood, such as good schools or a low crime rate. These sorts of information, which do not pertain to the risk directly, but are nonetheless sought as a consequence of the risk, exemplify the manner in which DISP seeks to expand the focus of the original RISP model. In the parlance of DISP, the model adds a “self-relevant” information dimension to RISP’s original focus on “risk-relevant” information.
Finally, the DISP model proposes the notion of “norm trumping,” suggesting that individuals experiencing disruption in the face of a hazard—who run afoul of the set of social norms associated with an identity in which they are highly invested—are likely to pay particular attention to self-relevant information that emphasizes alternative sets of norms that help to preserve or reconstitute a desired sense of self.
This model has yet to be tested empirically.
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Global Health and Critical Studies
Mohan Jyoti Dutta
Amid the large scale inequalities in health outcomes witnessed globally, communication plays a key role in reifying and in offering transformative spaces for challenging these inequities. Communicative processes are integral to the globalization of capital, constituting the economic conditions globally that fundamentally threaten human health and wellbeing. The dominant approach to global health communication, situated within the global capitalist logics of privatization and profiteering, deploys a culturally targeted and culturally sensitive framework for addressing individual behavior. The privatization of health as a commodity creates new market opportunities for global capital. The extraction of raw materials, exploitation of labor, and the reproduction of commoditization emerge on the global arena as the sites for reproducing and circulating health vulnerabilities. By contrast, the culture-centered approach to global health foregrounds the co-creative work of building communicative infrastructures that emerge as sites for resisting the neoliberal transformation of health care. Through processes of grassroots democratic participation and ownership over communicative resources, culture-centered interventions create anchors for community-level interventions that seek to transform unhealthy structures. A wide array of social movements, activist interventions, and advocacy projects emerging from the global margins re-interpret the fundamental meanings of health to create alternative structures for imagining health.
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Location-Based Ads and Exposure to Health and Risk Messages
Jonathan van 't Riet, Jorinde Spook, Paul E. Ketelaar, and Arief Hühn
Many of us use smartphones, and many smartphones are equipped with the Global Positioning System (GPS). This enables health promoters to send us messages on specific locations where healthy behavior is possible or where we are at risk of unhealthy behavior. Until now, the practice of sending location-based messages has been mostly restricted to commercial advertisements, most often in retail settings. However, opportunities for health promotion practice are vast. For one, location-based messages can be used to complement environmental interventions, where the environment is changed to promote health behavior. Second, location-based messages incorporate opportunities to tailor these messages to individual characteristics of the recipient, increasing perceived relevance. Finally, location-based messages offer the distinct possibility to communicate context-dependent social norm information. Five preliminary studies tested the effects of location-based messages targeting food choice. The results suggest that sending location-based messages is feasible and can be effective. Future studies should explore which messages are most effective under which circumstances.
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Rhetorical Construction of Bodies
Davi Johnson Thornton
Communication studies identifies bodies as both objects of communication and producers (or sites) of communication. Communication about bodies—for example, gendered bodies, disabled bodies, obese bodies, and surgically modified bodies—influences bodies at the physical, material level by determining how they are treated in social interactions, in medical settings, and in public institutions. Communication about bodies also forges cultural consensus about what types of bodies fit in particular roles and settings. In addition to analyzing the stakes of communication about bodies, communication studies identifies bodies as communicating forces that cannot be accounted for by standards of reason, meaning, and decorum. Bodies are physical, material, affective beings that communicate because of, not in spite of, their messy, ineffable status. Moreover, communication is an embodied process that involves a range of material supports, including human bodies, technological bodies, and other nonhuman physical and biological bodies. Investigating bodies as communicating forces compels an understanding of communication that is not exclusively rational, meaning-oriented, and nonviolent.
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Rhetoric of Health and Medicine
Justiss Wilder Burry and Lisa Melonçon
This article offers a review of relevant books from 2016 to 2024 to illustrate trends in the field of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). This article first traces the history of RHM from an emerging field to an established field within rhetorical studies. One of the markers of success for the field is that RHM, as a field, demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of the RHM. The article next describes the relevance of rhetoric to the field and then it synthesizes themes and commonalities within RHM scholarship. The article concludes by considering future directions for scholarly inquiry and ways for those new to RHM to learn about and contribute to the field.
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The ACT2 Program and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in HIV and AIDS Clinical Trials: A Case Study in Health and Risk Messaging
Marya Gwadz and Amanda S. Ritchie
It is well documented that African American/Black and Hispanic individuals are underrepresented in biomedical research in the United States (U.S.), and leaders in the field have called for the proportional representation of varied populations in biomedical studies as a matter of social justice, economics, and science. Yet achieving appropriate representation is particularly challenging for health conditions that are highly stigmatized such as HIV/AIDS. African American/Black, and Hispanic individuals, referred to here as “people of color,” are greatly overrepresented among the 1.2 million persons living with HIV/AIDS in the United States. Despite this, people of color are substantially underrepresented in AIDS clinical trials. AIDS clinical trials are research studies to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of promising new treatments for HIV and AIDS and for the complications of HIV/AIDS, among human volunteers. As such, AIDS clinical trials are critical to the development of new medications and treatment regimens. The underrepresentation of people of color in AIDS clinical trials has been criticized on a number of levels. Of primary concern, underrepresentation may limit the generalizability of research findings to the populations most affected by HIV/AIDS. This has led to serious concerns about the precision of estimates of clinical efficacy and adverse effects of many treatments for HIV/AIDS among these populations. The reasons for the underrepresentation of people of color are complex and multifaceted. First, people of color experience serious emotional and attitudinal barriers to AIDS clinical trials such as fear and distrust of medical research. These experiences of fear and distrust are grounded largely in the well-known history of abuse of individuals of color by medical research institutions, and are complicated by current experiences of exclusion and discrimination in health care settings and the larger society, often referred to as structural racism or structural violence. In addition, people of color experience barriers to AIDS clinical trials at the level of social networks, such as social norms that do not support engagement in medical research and preferences for alternative therapies. People of color living with HIV/AIDS experience a number of structural barriers to clinical trials, such as difficulty accessing and navigating the trials system, which is often unfamiliar and daunting. Further, most health care providers are not well positioned to help people of color overcome these serious barriers to AIDS clinical trials in the context of a short medical appointment, and therefore are less likely to refer them to trials compared to their White peers. Last, some studies suggest that the trials’ inclusion and exclusion criteria exclude a greater proportion of people of color than White participants. Social/behavioral interventions that directly address the historical and contextual factors underlying the underrepresentation of people of color in AIDS clinical trials, build motivation and capability to access trials, and offer repeated access to screening for trials, hold promise for eliminating this racial/ethnic disparity. Further, modifications to study inclusion criteria will be needed to increase the proportion of people of color who enroll in AIDS clinical trials.
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Worry and Rumination as a Consideration When Designing Health and Risk Messages
Tamara D. Afifi, Ariana Shahnazi, and Kathryn Harrison
Rumination is typically thought of as pessimistic, repetitive thinking or mulling that is deleterious for one’s health. Rumination, however, can take several forms and is not always harmful. In fact, it could actually be helpful in certain circumstances. It is common and often helpful when something stressful happens, like a health scare or problematic health diagnosis, for people to ponder or reflect on why it happened and brainstorm potential solutions to it. This is referred to as reflective rumination. Rumination affects people’s risk perceptions related to their personal and relational health and decision-making about their health. Research on negative rumination and health and positive rumination and health focuses on the impact of these patterns of thinking on health outcomes such as mental health, physical health, and relational health and as perceptions of health messages and risk likelihood.