The project consists of seven interrelated work packages organized in and across two subprojects.
Subproject 1
includes two work packages focusing on sexual health communication concerning young people from puberty to young adulthood.
Work package 1 Plain communication for young people will research sexual health information resources for young people in terms of e.g. availability, accessibility, visual and verbal representation and address, responsibility and narrative authority.
Work package 2 Communication about consent for and among young people is a topic that warrants special attention. Work package 2 investigates how the concept of consent is communicated across contexts: its definition in legislation; how it is discussed in public debates; how it is disseminated to young people through materials (e.g. texts, videos, advice columns) generated by organizations dedicated to sexual health; and how it is communicated about by young people in social media. PhD project, Solveig Pees.
Subproject 2
includes two work packages focusing on older people from mid-life.
Work package 3 Senior citizens, sex, stereotypes and taboos will research sexual health information resources for this age group in terms of e.g. availability, accessibility, visual and verbal representation and address. Focus will be on the extent to which the specific needs of senior citizens are addressed in the materials and on the multimodal discourses employed for doing so. In view of the general taboo surrounding the topic, WP3 will also investigate how the topic is communicated in information materials for care workers and health professionals in the area as well as in public discourse about the topic.
Work package 4 Discourses of menopause. Menopause is a point of convergence for many issues such as ageism and gender inequality in the workplace. Although menopause is an important, life-changing phenomenon in women’s lives, with significant physiological and psychological changes, the phenomenon is generally considered a private matter in Denmark (Skarum 2020) where it is still surrounded by stereotypes and taboo. This work package aims to shed light on the complexity of menopause representations in Denmark by investigating official and non-official multimodal discourses of menopause in the public domain, including sexual health information resources, social media, magazines, websites and self-help books. PhD project, Sasja Krogh.
Three work packages run across the two subprojects:
Work package 5 Diversity in sexual health communication. Work package 5 will focus on diversity in terms of sexuality, ethnicity/religion and able-bodiedness. It will investigate the inclusion of diversity in sexual health information materials for the broader population as well as the contents of resources targeted at specific population groups, researching whether and how the specific needs of these population groups are addressed by the resources and how different groups are represented and addressed multimodally.
Work package 6 Key issues in multimodality theory and method will advance theoretical and methodological research by investigating how medical knowledge is ‘translated’ into public information; researching what can and cannot be communicated about sensitive sexual health issues through images in image banks; and by qualifying the concept of “plain language” linguistically as well as multimodally.
Work package 7 Handbook of multimodal health communication. Findings from work packages 1-6 will be transformed into a practical handbook in Danish for health information professionals and students of health communication, thereby ensuring that academic impact is transformed into societal impact.