This distinctive collection explores the use of narratives in the social construction of wellness and illness. Narrative as an area of study in communication has been gaining popularity in recent years, and its application in the health area has become particularly strong. The emphasis of Narratives, Health, and Healing is on what the process of narrating accomplishes--how it serves in the health communication process where people define themselves and present their social and relational identities. Organized into four parts, the chapters included here examine health narratives in interpersonal relationships, organizations, and public fora. The editors provide an extensive introduction to weave together the various threads in the volume, highlight the approach and contribution of each chapter, and bring to the forefront the increasingly important role of narrative in health communication. This volume offers important insights on the role of narrative in communicating about health, and it will be on great interest to scholars and graduate students in health communication, health psychology, and public health. It is also relevant to medical, nursing, and allied health readers.

This distinctive collection explores the use of narratives in the social construction of wellness and illness. Narrative as an area of study in communication has been gaining popularity in recent years, and its application in the health area has become particularly strong. The emphasis of Narratives, Health, and Healing is on what the process of narrating accomplishes--how it serves in the health communication process where people define themselves and present their social and relational identities. Organized into four parts, the chapters included here examine health narratives in interpersonal relationships, organizations, and public fora. The editors provide an extensive introduction to weave together the various threads in the volume, highlight the approach and contribution of each chapter, and bring to the forefront the increasingly important role of narrative in health communication. This volume offers important insights on the role of narrative in communicating about health, and it will be on great interest to scholars and graduate students in health communication, health psychology, and public health. It is also relevant to medical, nursing, and allied health readers.

Although much scholarly and critical attention has been paid to the relationship between rhetoric and environmental issues, media and environmental issues, and politics and environmental issues, no book has yet focused on the relationship between popular culture and environmental issues. This collection of essays provides a rigorous and multifaceted rhetorical and critical perspective on the ways in which the language and imagery of nature is incorporated strategically into various popular culture texts--ranging from greeting cards to advertisements to supermarket tabloids. As a distinguished group of scholars reveals, our notions about the environment and environmentalism are both reflected in and shaped by our popular culture in fascinating ways never previously examined in an academic context.

The consumptive vision of nature presented in these texts represents a wholly American view, one promoting leisure and comfort, and nature as the place to experience them. This good life attitude toward the environment often serves to commodify it, to render it little more than space in which to pursue conventional notions of the American dream. As such, the volume represents a bold and striking vision both of popular culture and of popular notions of an environment that can be either protected or just simply consumed.

Popular culture provides a daily catalog of cultural attitudes, values, and practices. From television sitcoms to the daily news, from the theater to the sports stadium, we observe embodiments and enactments of character, virtue, honesty, and integrity (or lack thereof) in situations we find understandable, if not familiar. The essays in this volume address popular mediated constructions of ethical and unethical communication in news, sports, advertising, film, television, and the internet. Emphasis is on the consumption of popular culture messages, as well as how auditors make moral sense out of what they read, hear, and observe.