The Culture-Centred Approach (CCA) is a transformative framework in communication research, emphasizing the role of culture in shaping communication practices, health outcomes, and societal structures.
This meta-theory challenges traditional top-down models of communication by centering the voices of marginalized communities in the co-construction of health and social policies. By focusing on the intersections of power, agency, and structure, CCA advances a critical understanding of how communication can address social inequalities and injustices.
The methods that anchor the CCA are grounded in ethnography, activist collaborations, creative expressions, and participatory action research, working directly with communities to co-create voice infrastructures that foreground their lived experiences and the structural barriers they face. Through collaborative processes, CCA scholars co-create solutions and frameworks that are culturally relevant and locally situated, ensuring that communication interventions align with the needs of the people they intend to serve. These interventions range from co-building hospitals and co-designing health services, co-designing architectures for sustainable living, co-designing sustainable community-grounded food systems, building cultural spaces of healing, co-creating health promotion interventions to co-creating advocacy efforts, supporting land occupations through communication plans, mobilizing social movements, and co-designing 360 degrees promotional campaigns seeking to impact upstream policies.
In practice, CCA research builds sustainable dialogues with communities at the margins that challenge dominant discourses, emphasizing community agency and empowerment. Researchers engage with marginalized groups to amplify their voices, co-produce knowledge, and effect structural change in areas like health communication, environmental justice, and public policy. This bottom-up, community-led approach ensures that communication strategies are deeply rooted in the cultural contexts of the communities involved and are owned by communities who have been historically disenfranchised.
The CARE Conversations on the Culture-Centred Approach (CCA) Lecture Series will explore the theoretical foundations, research methods, and practical applications of the CCA, highlighting how it has been used to transform health communication and create lasting change.
Lecture 1: Building, Extending, and Evaluating Culture-Centred Scholarship: Insights from a Metatheoretical Systematic Review of CCA in Health Communication
Topic: Building, Extending, and Evaluating Culture-Centred Scholarship: Insights from a Metatheoretical Systematic Review of CCA in Health Communication
Speaker: Dr. Shaunak Sastry, Ph.D., Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati
Date: Monday, 23 September,2024
Time: 7 PM NZST
Location:
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/2654107148091112
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/Mnz2Aq3WLbA3WFou/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/WFOcThGWcSI?si=yZRreydXCZ0tdklm
About the Speaker:
Dr. Shaunak Sastry, Ph.D. is Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati and Director of The Cincinnati Project, a center for community-engaged research in the College of Arts & Sciences at UC. He is the 2024-2025 Provostal Fellow for community-engaged research at UC. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of critical health communication, globalization, and infectious disease politics. His award-winning research has been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals like Human Communication Research, Communication Theory, Health Communication, Journal of Health Communication, Communication Monographs, Culture, Health & Sexuality, Frontiers in Communication, and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, in addition to several book chapters and more than 50 paper presentations at national and international conferences. He is a senior editor of the journal Health Communication and sits on the editorial board of several other leading academic journals. He is the Chair of the National Communication Association’s (NCA) Research Council and serves on its Executive Committee. Dr. Sastry teaches courses in health communication, globalization, and research methods at the undergraduate and graduate level in the School of Communication, Film & Media Studies at UC.
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