Communicating Health, Illness and Disease COMMS5005

  • Academic Session: 2025-26
  • School: School of Critical Studies
  • Credits: 20
  • Level: Level 5 (SCQF level 11)
  • Typically Offered: Either Semester 1 or Semester 2
  • Available to Visiting Students: No
  • Collaborative Online International Learning: No
  • Curriculum For Life: No

Short Description

How do we communicate health, illness and disease? This course covers health communications in a variety of scales, locations, and contexts, extending from the clinical encounter, to public health communications, to the cultural authority of the medical professional. It brings to this topic the distinctive approaches and interests of humanities disciplines, offering a perspective complementary to that of health sociology.

Timetable

1 x 2hr online lecture

1 x 2hr field trip

1 x 2hr student-organised on-campus workshop

7 x 2hr on-campus seminar

 

This is one of the MSc options in Communications and may not run every year. The options that are running this session are available on MyCampus.

Requirements of Entry

Standard entry to Masters at College level.

Excluded Courses

None

Co-requisites

None

Assessment

5 minute presentation (25%)

1000 word analysis of ethical and responsible research (25%)

2000 word essay (50%)

Course Aims

This course introduces students to humanities perspectives upon health communication. Students will have the opportunity to encounter a range of approaches to health communication, broadly conceived to extend from the small scale of the clinical encounter to larger public and cultural statements on health, disease, and illness. Methods examined on the course may include corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, hermeneutics, discourse analysis, narrative medicine, and book and publishing history. Students will have the opportunity to situate specific topics and methods within wider socio-cultural and historical concerns, and within frameworks of ethical and responsible research.

Intended Learning Outcomes of Course

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Distinguish different methodological approaches to topics within health communication

• Formulate a reflective analysis of ethical and responsible research within a specific area of health communication

• Evaluate critical accounts of health communication with respect to wider socio-cultural and historical concerns

• Critically analyse and evaluate strategies of health communication with respect to a defined research topic

• Communicate responses to the material studied on the course both orally and in written form through coherent and sustained argument

• Work as an autonomous group to organise a lecture from a local expert on a student-led topic in health communication

Minimum Requirement for Award of Credits

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.