Culture Centered Approach

The culture-centered approach is a metatheoretical framework in communication for addressing inequalities and disparities. Developed by Professor Mohan J Dutta at Purdue University, the Culture centered approach is an innovative approach to health and social change communication that suggests a pathway for engaging in participatory collaborations with marginalized communities with the goal of creating access to basic healthcare, and developing economic and communication resources for local communities that exist at the margins of mainstream healthcare. Starting with the criticism of the dominant approaches of health communication that conceptualize culture as a barrier to the implementation of health campaigns, the approach suggests the fundamental importance of listening to local communities in the development of problem configurations and in the conceptualization of corresponding solutions. Noting the concept of hegemony in dominant theories of health communication, it is noted that most of these theories begin by problematizing the culture and by constructing it as a negative, something that needs to be changed through interventions that carried out by campaign planners. Culture-centered theorists argue that such treatments of culture as a pathology continue to reify the structural inequities in healthcare without really addressing the health needs of the poor and the underserved. Therefore, as a starting points, those voices need to be heard that challenge the status quo and instead suggest alternative meanings of health and illness. Ultimately, the objective of the culture-centered approach is to engage unhealthy policies that continue to reify health inequalities.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu