Product details
- ISBN 9781032763453
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 09 Nov 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Digital Health Discourse offers a comprehensive overview of how health and illness are talked about, represented, and negotiated across contemporary digital platforms. Bringing together linguistic, discourse-analytical, and multimodal perspectives, it explores a wide range of digital contexts—including health query interfaces, online support groups, websites, social media, mobile health apps, and patient feedback systems—to reveal how digital technologies shape notions of health knowledge, expertise, responsibility, and care in the digital age.
The textbook foregrounds the role of platform affordances, participation, and design in structuring interaction, while attending closely to broader social forces such as medicalization, commercialization, neoliberalism, and inequality. By combining theoretical discussion with rich, detailed examples from existing research, it equips readers with the conceptual tools needed to critically analyze 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.
Luke C. Collins is a Research Associate in the School of Medical Sciences at Manchester University. He is the co-author of Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication- A Guide for Research (Routledge 2023) and author of Corpus Linguistics for Online Communication- A Guide for Research ( Routledge 2019)
Gavin Brookes is Reader, UKRI Future Leader Fellow and Fulbright Scholar in the School of Social Sciences at Lancaster University. He is the co-author of Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication- A Guide for Research (Routledge 2023) and Masculinities and Language (Routledge 2025).
