New Textbook, Authored by SU's Agarwal, Released

SALISBURY, MD---Dr. Vinita Agarwal, Salisbury University professor of communication, has authored a new textbook, Health Communication as Social Justice: A Whole Person Activist Approach, from Routledge.

The book combines whole-person and social justice activist perspectives to educate students on the role of communication in promoting inclusive and person-centered health care practices.

The textbook explores health through the lens of a whole person approach and highlights how inequities and experienced by disadvantaged and marginalized populations are fundamentally connected with negative health outcomes and intergenerational precarity. Most importantly, the book outlines the actions students can take to address these challenges. 

It also demonstrates how physical, mental and emotional health is connected to equitable understandings of individual, community and environmental health. In addition, it considers how social, interpersonal and systemic factors such as personal relationships, language, literacy, religion, technology and the environment affect health equity. 

To present strategies and invite action to support the goals of the whole-person, social justice activist approach, Agarwal provides contemporary examples, interviews with communication scholars, and case studies that examine local communities and the everyday contexts of health meaning making.

This is Agarwal’s second book, following the 2020 release of the monograph Medical Humanism, Chronic Illness, and the Body in Pain: An Ecology of Wholeness. A third ebook, Communicating for Social Justice in Health contexts: Creating Opportunities for Inclusivity among Marginalized Groups has just been published as a collection of journal articles co-edited by Agarwal with health communication colleague, Elizabeth M. Glowacki. 

For more information visit the book’s Routledge webpage.

Learn more about SU and opportunities to Make Tomorrow Yours at www.salisbury.edu.