Decolonizing the pedagogy of health communication campaigns: a culture-centered approach

William J. McGuire's (2001) description of input and output variables that shape the seven-step procedure for campaign design notes the following critical step, "surveying the sociocultural situation involved identifying high-risk groups and factors in the social environment that instigate or interfere with the healthier lifestyle that is being urged " (p.23).McGuire then lays out target variables that affect persuasive impact, outlining beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.The output persuasion steps are measured at the individual level.These are just two examples from the text, with each chapter mapping out the individualistic ideology underlying health communication campaigns (for a detailed discussion, see Dutta, 2005).Historically, knowledge of health communication campaigns emerged from within a racist ontology that constructed the dark-skinned masses of the Global South as populations to be controlled, shaping the categories of knowledge, attitude, and behavior as the basis for configuring the pathways for change (see, for instance, the historical account of communication campaigns offered by Rogers & Storey, 1987).The global disciplinary growth of health communication campaigns and communication education on campaigns in its hegemonic form is shaped by the contours of the U.S. Empire and constituted within the Cold War ideology that constructs health communication as population control.Thus, health communication and campaigns are often intricately intertwined with the agendas of expanding racial capitalism under the guise of promoting democracy which functions to further U.S. and Western dominance via the promotion of global markets for U.S. capital extraction, militarization, nuclear proliferation, and "forever" wars (Dutta, 2005(Dutta, , 2006;;Dutta & Basu, 2011).Undergraduate and graduate courses on health communication campaigns teach the knowledge, attitude, and behavior framework, emergent from this racist individualizing frame.This dominant "diffusion of innovations" lens shaped the landscape of the health communication campaigns literature, constructing communities at the margins of the Global South as recipients of top-down health innovations (population-control strategies) designed in the North, drawing its conceptual register from eugenics (Dutta, 2005).The whiteness of health communication campaign pedagogy (e.g., reductively constructing communication as transactional) violently erases these histories of racial oppression and the ongoing practices of exploitation and suppression that constitute the negotiations of health at the margins of colonialism and capitalism (Elers & Dutta, 2023a, 2023b).For instance, much health campaign literature suggests that health barriers are largely attitudinal or due to knowledge deficits, which individualizes blame and erases the roles of settler colonial land occupation and expulsion from land on intergenerational trauma and health outcomes among Indigenous communities, even as such literatures construct those populations as vulnerable or at-risk (Elers & Dutta, 2023a, 2023b;Moewaka Barnes & McCreanor, 2019).Similarly, the role of slavery as the core determinant of health outcomes in Black communities and its ongoing expressions in Jim Crow laws, racist police violence, and carceral violence remains largely erased from the health communication campaigns literature (Randall, 2006).The overarching ideology of health communication as message design within the health communication literature exists in continuity with the interplays of settler colonialism and slavery, constructing communication as an instrument for targeting communities at the margins with culturally dressed-up messages (Dutta, 2007).Communication knowledge as the science of message design that forms the core of courses on health