Health communication scholarship has built on the health-promoting role of the community in exploring participatory communication techniques in community-based health promotion efforts. Community participation inculcates responsibility, strengthens community bonds, and provides a platform for diffusing health interventions. This power of a community to embody responsible action and promote participation in preventive behavior is examined in recent research on social capital. Exploring the link between community participation and health, this article demonstrates, through 2 survey studies, that health information orientation and health information efficacy are positively correlated with community participation. Furthermore, community participation is linked with prevention orientation, health beliefs, and health behaviors. Based on the findings, theoretical and pragmatic suggestions are presented.

Studies predict that the number of HIV infections among commercial sex workers (CSWers) in India may rise to 3.93 million. Efforts have been made to stem the tide. But most campaigns have been designed to ensure condom compliance among CSWers by spreading awareness and increasing availability. Absent from the discursive space of such campaigns are the agency of CSWers and their ability to resist dominant social structures. The authors respond to this lacuna in health communication by foregrounding voices of CSWers participating in two HIV/AIDS interventions in India. Based on the culture-centered approach to health communication and subaltern studies theory, it examines data from two sites to analyze how communicative narratives of agency and resistance are enacted in the marginalized lives of sex workers.

The connection between identity and health communication has been amply documented in communication research. How an individual frames oneself with respect to and in conjunction with one's interpersonal relationships and material and communicative structures shapes one's identity. This in turn shapes how one enacts the self, given the relationships and available contexts one is embedded in, all of which have a significant influence on how one communicates about and negotiates health and illness. This study reports the results of an ethnographic field study conducted during two periods-June and August 2007 and July and August 2009, which examined, chiefly through interviews of 46 participants, how members of a community of sex workers in Kalighat, in the city of Kolkata in India, communicatively constructed their selves with respect to their prevalent cultural indices and available structures, and how enunciations and enactments of sex worker selves as "mothers first" influenced localized patterns of HIV/AIDS communication and related work practices. Sex worker narratives suggested that mainstream assumptions and identity labels that depict sex workers as incapable mothers and the concurrent HIV/AIDS practices sex workers are asked to adopt need to be questioned and transformed to effect positive changes in health and HIV/AIDS negotiation practices among members of this marginalized community.

An emerging trend in health communication research advocates the need to foreground articulations of health by participants who are at the core of any health campaign. Scholarly work suggests that the culture-centered approach to health communication can provide a theoretical and practical framework to achieve this objective. The culture-centered approach calls for attention to dialogue and locates the agency of cultural participants in the culture being studied. This approach underlines the import of participation of community members in the enunciation of health problems as a step toward achieving meaningful change. Based on the culture-centered approach, this article examines narratives of sex workers to analyze how participatory communicative strategies frame discourses and practices of health, particularly those related to HIV/AIDS.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of branding in public health campaigns. Design/methodology/approach -The paper reviews public health campaigns, and their goals and objectives vis-à -vis the current health market conditions. The imperatives for branding public health campaigns are enumerated. The paper then discusses salient features of branding that can be applied to health campaigns before drawing on an exemplar to illustrate how branding can be effectively harnessed in the realm of public health campaign theorizing and praxis. Findings -Given the clutter of campaigns and their messages in a saturated health consumer market, uptake and sustained use of health campaigns needs alternative pathways to keep consumers interested and gainfully engaged with the products being offered. Branding, as a communicative strategy, can meet this need. Originality/value -As the fundamental goal of a public health campaign is to induce and sustain health behavior among the public, efforts must be kept up to theorize about improved modes of delivering campaign products to consumers. This paper takes the initial steps in that direction.