The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication (Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics) (2ND)

The fully revised and updated edition of The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication examines the linguistic and multimodal practices through which health and illness are communicated across clinical, policy, and everyday settings. The volume responds to developments in health communication research since the publication of the first edition, including the growing role of digital communication and the ways the Covid-19 pandemic affected health policies and everyday interactions. Bringing together international scholarship from disciplines including linguistics, anthropology, media studies, health informatics, social psychology and more besides, it examines how communication shapes understandings of health and illness across professional and public contexts. This second edition features a new editorial team and introduction, as well as eleven new chapters addressing developments in areas such as multimodal discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, metaphor analysis, pandemic risk communication, and communication skills training for health professionals. Through case studies of online health communities, social media discourse, and public health communication, contributors examine how communicative practices organise experiences of health and illness, with new chapters addressing topics such as Covid-19 memes, storefront Covid-19 signs and digital crowdfunding. Combining established approaches to language analysis with methods suited to contemporary digital and multimodal environments, the handbook demonstrates the contribution of linguistic research to understanding health communication in practice. It offers a critical account of the ways communication mediates clinical relationships, public understandings of health, and interactions between communities and healthcare systems.