Diagnosing Unsettled Stasis in Transnational Communication Design: An Exploration of Public Health Emergency Communication

ABSTRACT

This article builds four composite characters from the international Zika response to demonstrate each role’s position relative to inclusive health communication. I argue that a lack of jurisdictional stasis is at play in decision-making practices about transnational risk communication approaches. During emergency health responses, this lack of jurisdictional stasis functions to maintain the status quo in order for stakeholders to leverage their power in prioritizing local deliberations in transnational public health discourse and decision making.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational
• stasis
• health communication
• community engagement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In keeping with norms of global health discourse and of the context of this study, I preserve the gendered language used by the organizations throughout this manuscript that refers to women and girls. Terms such as “women of reproductive age” are consistent with the WHO and were used nearly exclusively to refer to people with uteruses who could be affected by Zika in utero or by giving birth to a child with congenital Zika syndrome. This term also reflects the history of gender-based violence that has predominantly affected people assigned female at birth. That said, the author acknowledges that this language can be harmful and reductive, particularly because transgender and non-binary people with uteruses are reproductive agents and that people who identify as women of reproductive age may not be able or choose to reproduce.

2. More recently, the global health discourse community has dropped “communication” from the disciplinary title to account for the various way that behavior change interventions can be broader than what’s traditionally considered “communication.”

3. Often, in my experience, these issues were tabled for pandemic preparedness discussions or for “lessons learned” documents meant to support future outbreak responses.

4. All names of individuals and organizations in the narrative composites are fictional.

5. Here, I reference Galison’s (1997) trading zone, referred to by Wilson and Herndl (2007) in their argument that a knowledge map created a boundary object to facilitate understanding of how knowledge from different areas within the interdisciplinary group that they were working with created a zone through which knowledge important to disparate parties about a shared area of concern could pass.

6. For more on empowerment, refer to chapter 4 of Dingo’s (2012) Networking Arguments

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Gerdes

Julie Gerdes is an assistant professor of technical and professional writing and rhetoric at Virginia Tech. She works at the intersection of technical communication and global public health. Her interdisciplinary research examines methodologies for understanding and implementing inclusive risk communication, particularly during public health emergencies.