El. knyga: Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine

"Incommunicable builds on philosophical dialogues of language and medicine to analyze incommunicability in the context of medical practice and public health discourse. A contrast to the concepts of communicability and biocommunicability that Charles L. Brigg's has developed throughout his career to study circulatory and biomedical power, incommunicability instead highlights the moments in which forms of communication face failure. Incommunicable questions dominant notions of communicability, which construct discourse and pathogens as inherently mobile, by rethinking the works and lives of philosopher-physicians John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and George Canguilhem, as well as W. E. B. Du Bois. Drawing on examples such as doctor-patient interaction within racialized communities and an extensive study of the COVID-19 pandemic, Briggs addresses the erosion of trust and rejection of expertise that has become prominent in science and medicine. As a study rooted in anthropological and linguistic analysis, Incommunicable intends to decolonize understandings of language and communication within medicine and health"--

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 healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians—John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges 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 the disease 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 healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.

Charles L. Briggs examines and challenges the long-standing foundational concepts in the communication of health care to work toward more just and equitable medical futures.