Culture-Centered Approach as Critical Health Practice: The Body as Resistance

Abstract

In this chapter, we offer an overview of the culture-centered approach (CCA) as an embodied critical health communication meta-theory emergent from community struggles for land, food, decent wages, decent work, adequate and safe housing, gender justice, and racial-economic justice. We argue that the interpretive register of the CCA, rooted in the question, “What does health mean to you?” engaged with the materiality of the empirical registers of health, creates a transformative opening for dismantling the whiteness of health communication as a discipline. We demonstrate how the organizing logics of health communication, based on narrow definitions of health rooted in the values of white culture, continue to perpetuate health promotion through dominant theoretical approaches focused on constructs centering individualism, reductionism, and linearity, for the creation, dissemination, and reproduction of messages seeking to produce health behaviors.