Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The different narratives of a situation by the different people involved in it reminded me of a movie very close to my heart, Rashomon . As Connelly (2002) succintly puts it, the decision to retell a story will depend on the personal reasons/ motivations of the reteller. In today's world of health communication we have so many competing narratives. The search for the "real" or "right" narrative is not important but what's important is not to ignore these stories. Narratives provide us invaluable insights into a human beings life, suffering, existence, surrounding, health. In many ways it provides us a ground to move ahead, take decisions.  In emergency response, in the first 48 hours, usually teams do not find much records or information as most records are affected and the normal information channels are in a disarray and non functional. So, the way the response team moves ahead is by collecting narratives: "so please tell us how did the flood waters c...

In my discussions of the culture-centered approach, I suggest that health communication scholars and practitioners need to shift attention away from merely discussing individual-level health behaviors targeted through health promotion efforts to looking at the underlying structural conditions that create and sustain conditions of violence that fundamentally threaten human health across the globe. Acts of violence (many of which are state sanctioned) typically lay hidden from the mainstream media and from talks of global health promotion initiatives. Although more fundamentally aligned with issues of health because of the very nature of risks they pose to human health, these stories of violence have remained largely absent from the work we engage in. These stories need to be told and health communicators have a key role to play in interrogating violence and bringing to public attention forms of violence that threaten human health. Ultimately, we as individual academics and as communitie...