Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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...