International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Health Communication for Displaced Populations

What does it mean to communicate care across borders, barriers, and bureaucracies? And how might health communication rise to meet the needs of those who are so often left at its margin?

Guest-edited by Stefanie Z. Demetriades, Nathan Walter, and Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, this Special Section on Health Communication for Displaced Populations brings together 10 original articles that examine how communication shapes health experiences in contexts marked by mobility, precarity, and adaptation.

Spanning rhetorical, ethnographic, interpretive, and quantitative approaches, the Special Section traces the institutional, familial, and political dynamics that make communication both a potential bridge and a recurring barrier. The authors explore a wide range of issues: from digital inequality in refugee humanitarian organizations to the challenges of telehealth acceptance; from intergenerational health talk in immigrant families to the communicative tensions faced by asylum medicine practitioners. Others highlight how structural inequities around food security, health literacy, and cultural competence are experienced and resisted through communicative means.

At a time of growing global displacement and widening health disparities, these contributions call for a conscious orientation of the field away from viewing displacement as an exception and toward recognizing it as a central lens for understanding health communication’s obligations to equity and justice. Rather than treat communication as a downstream intervention, this collection positions it as a foundational element of health itself.

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on July 1, 2025. Please log into ijoc.org to read the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback!

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Health Communication for Displaced Populations—Introduction
Stefanie Z. Demetriades, Ayse Lokmanoglu, Nathan Walter

Narratives of Dispossession: Reading Antecedents of Public Health Rhetoric in Reconstruction
Bailey Flynn

Living Through Food Rations: A Culture-Centered Study With Rohingya Refugees
Md Mahbubur Rahman, Mohan J. Dutta, Phoebe Elers

The Limits of Language: New Directions for Measurement of the Buffering Effects of Social Support on Acculturative Stress
Chris L. Robbins, Danielle Hagood

Physician Advocacy in a “Culture of Disbelief”: A Critical-Interpretive Study of Asylum Medicine
Smita Misra-Latty

Cultural Competence in U.S. Health Care: Voices of the Arab Community
Kayan Khraisheh

Communicatively Constructing Health and Healing: Cultural and Behavioral Determinants of Prostate Cancer Screening Among Ghanaian Men in the United States
Kate Nimako, Amy E. Chadwick

Knowledge, Attitude, and Behavior About COVID-19: The Roles of Health Literacy and English Proficiency Among Korean Immigrants in the United States
Seulgi Park, Rukhsana Ahmed

Exploring Relationships Between Family Communication Patterns and Willingness to Communicate About Health Topics Among Vietnamese Americans
Angie Vo, Grace Ellen Brannon

Digital Inequality and Resilience in Humanitarian Refugee Organizations
Minkyung Kim, Marya L. Doerfel

Using a Modified Technology Acceptance Model and Communication Inequality Theory to Evaluate Telehealth Acceptance Among Resettled Refugees
Lindsey Disney, Rukhsana Ahmed, Yohan Moon

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Silvio Waisbord, Editor 
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Andrew Taylor, Webmaster 
Stefanie Z. Demetriades, Nathan Walter, Ayse Lokmanoglu, Guest Editors

Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 7th among all Humanities journals and 9th among all Communications journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access scholarly publication at the highest level.