Routledge Studies in Language, Health and Culture

This series has several distinctive features. First, it investigates health communication through linguistic lenses. The contributions to the series in the form of research monographs or targeted edited volumes will introduce the readers to a range of linguistic approaches, including, but not limited to (critical) discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, multimodal analysis, corpus analysis, conversation analysis, etc. Second, what will bring these versatile approaches together in the series is that they will draw on authentic empirical data from a range of healthcare contexts (e.g. acute care, traditional medicine, secondary care), going beyond the traditional doctor-patient encounters and expanding the focus of inquiry to online healthcare provision, interprofessional communication, etc.

Second, the series focuses specifically on contexts outside of the mainstream English-dominant healthcare contexts. The series solicits proposals from contributors working on healthcare communication in Asia-Pacific, South America, continental Europe, etc., putting to the forefront the growing body of research representing versatile sociocultural and linguistic contexts.

Third, it is expected that some contributions will focus on multicultural and multilingual healthcare encounters, thus making the series of relevance to a broad readership around the world.

In line with some of the core principles of linguistic research in healthcare contexts, the series will encourage contributions that, in addition to advancing the linguistic field, will also stress relevance to professional practice (Sarangi and Candlin, 2011). The editor will invite, where appropriate, healthcare and medical professionals in a relevant field to critically review and endorse, or to write a short foreword to the contributions. This feature will encourage a trans-disciplinary dialogue between linguistic and health communication scholars and healthcare and medical professionals, thus increasing the potential readership.