Contemporary healthcare is undergoing profound transformations due to changes in knowledge production, shifts in health and social care practices, variations in the provision of services and, above all, alterations in the state of being a patient (Torkkola & Sendra-Toset, 2026, pp. 99–107). At the center of these transformations, communication plays a fundamental role in how health and illness, expertise, care and responsibility are understood, negotiated and constructed.
In this conference, we invite scholars and practitioners from across Europe to rethink the role of communication in the transformation of contemporary healthcare, paying particular attention to who can participate in this transformation and the mechanisms that enable such participation.
For example, despite increased access to health and medical information, care receivers continue to be in a position of disadvantage when constructing knowledge about their conditions in the medical encounter (Torkkola & Sendra-Toset, 2026a, pp. 38–39). That is, in contemporary healthcare, communication has a role both in the construction of health and illness as well as in “the deprivation of a person’s rights and privileges” (Hintz & Scharp, 2024, p. 89). Similarly, although patient-centeredness has been the dominant paradigm for framing relationships between care providers and care receivers for decades, traditional organizational hierarchies are often still reconstructed in written health communication (Torkkola & Sendra-Toset, 2026b).
The ongoing transformation also challenges healthcare professionals, work communities, and organizations. For example, increasingly complex health concerns and service needs among clients and patients are forcing the reorganization of healthcare delivery, with a particular emphasis on the need to strengthen interprofessional collaboration (Fox, McAllum & Mikkola, 2025). Both organizational hierarchies and professional identities are produced and negotiated through communication, where collaboration as well as tensions between actors become materialized (Karppinen, Mikkola & Lahti, 2025).
On a societal level, communication plays an important role in shaping health citizenship as healthcare changes. Modern societies assume that “active citizens are capable of making informed choices over their own lifestyle and health” (Jauho & Helén, 2023, p. 479). This capability is manifested through physical forms of communication (e.g., food labelling) but also digitally, such as the notifications and messages that emanate from digital health technologies (Klausen, 2024; Nordtug, Brøgger & Møller, 2021). That is, in contemporary healthcare, how citizens use and interpret these increased digital and non-digital forms of communication has a role in how they adopt health behaviors (Dutta, 2010).
In front of the urgent need for quality health information (Gostin, Ratzan & Batista, 2026), rethinking the role of communication in contemporary healthcare allows us to see communication beyond its instrumental understanding and recognize the information environment as a major social determinant of health (Palmer & Gorman, 2025). It enables us to identify how communication shapes the construction of experiential knowledge in online communities and understand why most care providers resist incorporating it in their work practices (Sendra, Torkkola & Parviainen, 2023). In the foreseeable future, rethinking the role of communication in contemporary healthcare will also assist us in understanding how health is being impacted by GenAI (Lupton, 2026).
The conference welcomes scholars from diverse disciplinary traditions and methodological approaches to rethink the role of communication in contemporary healthcare at times marked by conflict and uncertainty. The conference also seeks to foster dialogue across different fields of study to explore the fundamental role of communication in contemporary healthcare.
Possible topics within the conference theme include but are not limited to:
- Barriers and inequalities in health communication
- Power relations and identity negotiation between care providers and care receivers in contemporary healthcare
- Interprofessional communication and multiagency in health and social care
- Communicative tasks and communication competencies of care providers in contemporary healthcare
- Care receiver, care provider and next of kin interaction
- GenAI and health communication in contemporary healthcare
- Agency, resistance and empowerment in health communication
- Risk and crisis communication in contemporary healthcare
- Representations and constructions of health and illness across diverse communication contexts, including media, journalism, online communication, organizational communication, health promotion and interpersonal communication
- Healthcare digitalization and the transformation of the communication environment in contemporary healthcare
- Health information seeking and the information environment in health communication
- Organizational communication in contemporary healthcare
- Misinformation, disinformation and trust in health communication
- Emerging theories and methods in health communication
Submission formats
We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological or reflective submissions. We also welcome submissions about work in progress as well as practical applications / applied research.
Proposals can be submitted as presentations or posters. Work in progress as well as practical applications / applied research can be submitted as posters only.
Individual presentations
Individual presentations should be submitted in the form of abstracts with a maximum length of 500 words (excl. references, tables and figures). If accepted, the submission will be presented within one session together with different abstracts from different authors.
Posters
Posters should be submitted in the form of abstracts with a maximum length of 300 words (excl. references, tables and figures). For work in progress submissions, the current stage of the work should be clearly indicated in the abstract.
If accepted, posters will be showcased throughout the conference and presented in a dedicated poster session with different posters from different authors.
Timeline
- Submission system opens: 1 January 2027
- Submission deadline: 28 February 2027
- Notification of acceptance: 1 May 2027
- Registration opens: 1 May 2027
- Registration deadline: 31 July 2027
- Conference: 15-17 September 2027
References
Dutta, M. J. (2010). The Critical Cultural Turn in Health Communication: Reflexivity, Solidarity, and Praxis. Health Communication, 25(6-7), 534-539. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2010.497995
Fox, S., McAllum, K., & Mikkola, L. (2025). How to Conceptualize Communication in Interprofessional Practice. In S. Fox, K. McAllum and L. Mikkola (Eds.), Interprofessional Communication in Health and Social Care (pp. 3-24). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70106-1_1
Gostin, L. O., Ratzan, S. C., & Batista, C. (2026). Quality health information for all is a fundamental determinant of health. Nature Medicine, 32, 1180-1181. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-026-04320-x
Hintz, E. A., & Scharp, K. M. (2024). Theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement: introduction, explication, and application. Journal of Communication, 74(2), 89-100. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqae002
Jauho, M., & Helén, I. (2023). Citizenship by vitality: rethinking the concept of health citizenship. Distinktion, 24(3), 467-487. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2057561
Karppinen, K. A., Mikkola, L. & Lahti, M. (2025). Identity construction through talk of difference and similarity: blocking and threading analysis. Journal of Communication, 75(4), 285-296. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf024
Klausen, M. (2024). Disconnective care: Chronic illness and digital patienthood. In K. Albris, K. Fast, F. Karlsen, A. Kaun, S. Lomborg, & T. Syvertsen (Eds.), The digital backlash and the paradoxes of disconnection (pp. 153-170). Nordicom. https://doi.org/10.48335/9789188855961-8
Lupton, D. (2026). Revisiting critical digital health studies in the age of generative AI: Research in Health and beyond. Health, online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634593261451272
Nordtug, M., Brøgger, M. N., & Møller, J. E. (2021). “Therefore, I would like an allergy test”: Responsibly conducting a healthy body through the e-mail consultation platform. MedieKultur, 37(71), 187-204. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v37i71.122373
Palmer, A., & Gorman, S. (2025). Misinformation, trust, and health: The case for information environment as a major independent social determinant of health. Social Science & Medicine, 381, 118272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118272
Sendra, A., Torkkola, S., & Parviainen, J. (2023). Non-knowledge in medical practices: approaching the uses of social media in healthcare from an epistemological perspective. Journal of Digital Social Research, 5(1), 70-89. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i1.152
Torkkola, S., & Sendra-Toset, A. (2026a). Healthcare and Patient Communication in the Digital Era: A Patienthood and Patient Perspective. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003519607
Torkkola, S. & Sendra-Toset, A. (2026b, Jul. 1). Patient-centeredness in written health communication [Paper presentation]. International Association for Media and Communication Research 2026 Conference, University of Galway, Ireland.