Digital Health Discourse

The textbook foregrounds the role of platform affordances, participation and design in structuring interaction, while attending closely to broader social forces such as medicalisation, commercialisation, neoliberalism and inequality. By combining theoretical discussion with rich, detailed examples from existing research, it equips readers with the conceptual tools needed to critically analyse digital health communication and understand how everyday online interactions not only reflect but continually shape and reshape contemporary health practices.

Through detailed case studies, the book demonstrates how to conduct discourse analyses of interactions that use language and other visual resources, involving both health experts and non-professionals, including those with lived experience. Readers are invited to complete practical tasks designed to inspire their own research into the ever-expanding domains of digital health communication. Essential for researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of language and health, health communication, and discourse analysis.