Discourses of Disease

Research on HIV/AIDS in linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and literacy studies has followed the course of the pandemic from when it first became widely known in the United States, where early research focused on gay men and their communications with doctors, counselors, and each other in relation to risk and transmission. As time progressed, research shifted to sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to focus on the discourse of prevention campaigns and public responses to risk reduction strategies. More recently, researchers have examined how people communicate about HIV/AIDS, focusing on how individuals interact with public health discourse in participatory approaches that change the way that HIV/AIDS is framed in educational and institutional contexts. Decades of research has shown a recurring gap in health communication about HIV/AIDS due to the imposition of a biomedical understanding of HIV/AIDS (the “healthworld”) on individuals’ situated perspectives and lived experiences within particular sociocultural contexts (the “lifeworld”).