Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine

Author:   Charles L. Briggs
Publisher:   Duke University Press
ISBN:  

9781478026006


Pages:   336
Publication Date:   19 April 2024
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Not yet available   Availability explained
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Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine


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Overview

"In Incommunicable Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and health care providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians-John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and George Canguilhem-to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts. He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined COVID-19 based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to ""misinformation"" and ""conspiracy theories."" This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and health-care discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability."

Full Product Details

Author:   Charles L. Briggs
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9781478026006


ISBN 10:   1478026006
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   19 April 2024
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available   Availability explained
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction  1 Part I: Philosophical Dialogues in Search of Incommunicability 1. The Incommunicable Menance Lurking within Locke’s Charter for Communicability  29 2. W. E. B. Du Bois: Incommunicability and/as the Veil  41 3. Frantz Fanon: Doctors, Tarzan, and the Colonial Inscription of Incommunicability  53 4. Georges Canguilhem and the Clinical Production of Incommunicability  71 Part II: How Incommunicability Shapes Entanglements of Language and Medicine 5. Biocommunicable Labor and the Production of Incommunicability in “Doctor-Patient Interaction”  81 6. Health Communication: How In/communicabilities Jump Scale  109 Interlude: Social Movements and Incommunicability-Free Zones  149 Part III: Communicable Contours of the COVID-19 Pandemic 7. Pandemic Ecologies of Knowledge: In Defense of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, Sort of  161 8. Pandemic Ecologies of Care  197 Conclusion  265 Notes  275 References  283 Index  307

Reviews

“In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs provokes readers to consider a deeper understanding of the political, cultural, and economic structuring over the long term of medicine, biomedical science, and global health; and how this sets the grounds for their deconstruction and failure. Language and suffering, meaning and treatment channel power to reshape health and disease and biomedical science so as to reproduce inequality. Briggs powerfully shows how this works. A book of real importance!” -- Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University


Author Information

Charles L. Briggs is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is coauthor of Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice, also published by Duke University Press.

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