Boxed Out: Disability, Health Communication, and the Boundaries of Disciplinary Knowledge. | CU Experts

This study asks where disability perspectives are situated within health communication research and what it would take to make them central rather than peripheral. We conducted a scoping review of core and adjacent health communication journals using title and abstract searches for keywords "disability" or "disabled," with no date limits. Across 469 items, about 27.6% explicitly name disability in titles/abstracts, and publication is concentrated in a small subset of outlets. Keyword profiling shows clinical and management terms outweigh access- and justice-oriented language, indicating that disability is most often framed as a problem to be corrected rather than as knowledge to be centered. Based on these findings, we argue for a paradigm shift: treat disability perspectives as foundational to theory, method, and practice in health communication. Concretely, journals should reward access/rights language in titles and abstracts; require or encourage positionality, demographic detail, and participation/co-production reporting; and explicitly welcome participatory, ethnographic, rhetorical, and design approaches alongside interventions. These structural changes would improve discoverability and accountability, widen who counts as a knower, and align research practices with accessibility and equity goals, moving disability from managed object to coauthored perspective.

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