ABSTRACT
Insights from critical health communication are fundamental to the discipline’s goal to promote communication theories and practices that enhance health. Yet more work is needed to articulate how foregrounding an emancipatory approach to conflict, power, and politics can reshape the field’s approaches. In this chapter, I elucidate my critical health and organizational perspective, which combines Gramscian, poststructural, and critical pragmatic perspectives. Using this lens, I describe the implications of Western health ideologies embedded in discourses diagnosing the causes of preventable illness and health disparities, and detail two experimental organizing efforts that reflect an alternative, Critically Holistic framework for health and health promotion. The Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) and the worker-owned union cooperative movement (1worker1vote) reconfigure dominant approaches to workplace health by promoting healthy work in more sustainable and equitable economies. These examples challenge tacit disciplinary assumptions about what is “modifiable” by demonstrating the practicality of collective organizing for social change.
