Engaging in Health Activism through Neighbor-to-Neighbor Communication.

Given the importance of local organizing to environmental health advocacy and activism, we need more understanding of how neighbors communicate about health risks. Individual residents in a neighborhood can be agents of social change, communicating about common health concerns and ways to cope with them, potentially leading to health activism. In this study, we used a grounded theory approach to analyze Pennsylvania residents' (N = 407) responses to open-ended questions that asked their thoughts on engaging in conversations with neighbors about the risk of lead exposure. Our findings describe (a) what respondents would want to share with neighbors about health risks and how they would communicate with their neighbors, (b) what actions they would like to promote to neighbors, and (c) what additional factors would facilitate conversations with neighbors. Based on the critical examination of the findings, we discuss communication strategies that can motivate health activism to bring about social structural changes.

#March for Our Lives: Health Activism, Diagnostic Framing, Gun Control, and the Gun Industry.

This article investigates #March for Our Lives as health activism. Students organized a social media campaign, major marches and other events after surviving the 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Many commentators praised the group's success in rallying public attention to gun violence, promoting gun safety legislation, and challenging the National Rifle Association. This critical analysis sheds light on how the students' Twitter activism addressed longstanding framing and attribution practices that impede structural and policy responses to gun violence, including efforts to address the gun industry. We investigated how the activists' diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing attributed the causes of gun violence, promoted solutions, and fostered support. The conclusion discusses the implications of #March for Our Lives strategies for our understanding of health social movements, challenges to corporate power and influence, and the politics of framing and illness attributions.

Health Activism Targeting Corporations: A Critical Health Communication Perspective.

Health activists and health social movements have transformed medical treatment, promoted public health policies, and extended civil rights for people with illness and disability. This essay explores health activism that targets corporate-generated illness and risk in order to understand the unique communicative challenges involved in this area of contention. Arguing for greater critical engagement with policy, the article integrates policy research with social movements, subpolitics, and issue management literature. Drawing from activist discourse and multidisciplinary research, the article describes how a wide array of groups groups build visibility for corporate health effects, create the potential for networking and collaboration, and politicize health by attributing illness to corporate behaviors. The discussion articulates the implications of this activism for health communication theory, research, and practice.

Perspectives on Communication and Participation in Research Notification Focus Groups.

Researchers are slowly acknowledging an ethical obligation to inform research participants about study findings. Research notification may help participants become aware of and manage potential health risks. Scholars and practitioners have acknowledged the need for better understanding of this process. This study investigates transcripts of focus groups conducted to gauge audience reactions to notification materials that communicate scientific research findings about occupational exposures. Focus groups are a useful way to tailor notification materials to audiences, but we caution that transmission models of communication used in risk research may obscure the full value of focus groups. The emphasis on translating scientific communication into "lay" language may overlook how scientists and lay audiences can work together to bridge differences in language, experiences, goals, and orientations toward health. This study demonstrates limitations in scientific risk communication that minimize participation in communicating science. The conclusion provides instructive insights for strengthening the process of communicating science.

The social construction of occupational health and safety: barriers to environmental-labor health coalitions.

Occupational and environmental health advocates promote the potential of alliances between workers and community members to address shared health problems resulting from industrial processes. Advocates recognize the need to overcome job blackmail, which has successfully pitted these groups against one another by threatening job loss in the face of calls for improved standards. This strategic form of issue management represents a dualism between good health and clean environments on one hand and jobs and tax bases on the other. The author argues that overcoming job blackmail requires attention not only to this dualism, but to the broader social construction of occupational and environmental health. The article describes a series of oppositional constructions, in both strategic organizational rhetoric and everyday cultural discourse, which reinforces job blackmail and impedes the development of solidarity among workers, neighbors, and environmental advocates. These dualisms polarize our views of work and environment, science, and social identity, thereby producing barriers to coalition formation. Understanding these reifications helps to build an activist agenda and identify potential resources for organizing to overcome these barriers.

Television illness depictions, identity, and social experience: responses to multiple sclerosis on The West Wing among people with MS.

This project contributes to our understanding of how audiences interpret televised depictions of illness by investigating responses to the depiction of multiple sclerosis (MS) on the television drama The West Wing from 1999 to 2002. The study employs qualitative methods, including a focus group, individual interviews, and the collection of electronic message board posts to investigate how people with MS interpret the dramatization of the illness. Findings are analyzed in terms of respondents' perceptions of (a) the portrayal of the physical disease, (b) the portrayal of the social dimensions of MS, and (c) the impact of this portrayal for themselves and others with the disease. The study found that participants engaged in self-comparisons with the depiction of MS within the program. These comparisons resulted in a range of reactions from individuals varying in relation with their multiple physical and social experiences with the illness. Thus, illness experience adds complexity to judgments about accuracy, meaning, and outcomes related to health depictions. Participants expressed a desire to see more symptoms depicted, and they noted concern about the identities communicated to the public about people with MS and its influence on their daily, lived experience.