Health Communication for Displaced Populations| Health Communication for Displaced Populations—Introduction

Abstract

Despite growing recognition of communication’s role in addressing health disparities, the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants remain underrepresented in both scholarship and applied work. The persistent marginalization of displaced populations in health communication research and practice presents an urgent challenge to the field. Spanning rhetorical, ethnographic, interpretive, and quantitative approaches, the ten articles in this Special Section take up that challenge. Collectively, they examine how communication shapes health experiences in contexts marked by mobility, precarity, and adaptation—serving at times as a barrier, at others as a bridge. From institutional mistrust to family dynamics, digital access to language and literacy, these studies trace the complex realities of navigating, sustaining, and reimagining care among displaced populations. Individually, each article offers compelling conceptual and empirical insights. Taken together, they serve as something more: a call to the field to treat displacement not as an edge case but as a central point of inquiry—one that brings into sharper focus health communication’s obligations to equity, impact, and relevance, and expands the field’s capacity to engage with those most often left at its margins.