Disputing meanings, affirming margins: the critical potential of cultural studies in public health
1
School of Medical Sciences, Graduate Program in Collective Health, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), Campinas, Brazil
2
Department of Nursing, Graduate Program in Collective Health, Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE), Fortaleza, Brazil
Popul. Med. 2026;8(Supplement Supplement 1):A3715
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION:
Public health has progressively embraced principles of integrality, equity, and plurality, recognizing health as shaped by social, cultural, and political dimensions. However, knowledge production often operates through frameworks that privilege certain rationalities while rendering others invisible. Cultural studies (CS) offer a critical perspective that understands science itself as a cultural practice traversed by power relations and meaning-making disputes¹-². We highlight three articulating principles³-⁴: radical contextualization⁵, which situates practices within historical, political, and affective conditions; location⁶-⁷, which recognizes that all knowledge is produced from somewhere, by someone, with specific social markers; and anti-essentialism⁵, which refuses fixed meanings and stable identities, understanding culture as a relational field of continuous negotiation.
METHODS:
This study mobilizes the Expanded circuit of culture (ECC), an analytical model rooted in CS and adapted for health research⁴. The ECC comprises six interrelated dynamics: representation, identity conceived as actant, regulation, production/counter-production, consumption, and sensoriality. These operate not as isolated categories but as articulated dimensions shaping how meanings circulate, stabilize, and are contested⁸. The model positions the researcher as an implicated interpreter, acknowledging situated and politically engaged knowledge production.
RESULTS:
The application of the ECC, guided by the articulating principles, reveals how health research simultaneously produces and silences meanings. It illuminates mechanisms through which certain practices gain legitimacy while relational, subjective, and ancestral dimensions of care remain underrepresented, affirming margins as spaces of knowledge production and re-existence⁹.
CONCLUSIONS:
The CS and the ECC offer an analytical lens for health research committed to epistemic justice, plurality, and integrality. By repositioning the researcher as an implicated interpreter, this approach calls on health research to listen to the margins as a political and epistemic commitment toward a more just and plural health.
Public health has progressively embraced principles of integrality, equity, and plurality, recognizing health as shaped by social, cultural, and political dimensions. However, knowledge production often operates through frameworks that privilege certain rationalities while rendering others invisible. Cultural studies (CS) offer a critical perspective that understands science itself as a cultural practice traversed by power relations and meaning-making disputes¹-². We highlight three articulating principles³-⁴: radical contextualization⁵, which situates practices within historical, political, and affective conditions; location⁶-⁷, which recognizes that all knowledge is produced from somewhere, by someone, with specific social markers; and anti-essentialism⁵, which refuses fixed meanings and stable identities, understanding culture as a relational field of continuous negotiation.
METHODS:
This study mobilizes the Expanded circuit of culture (ECC), an analytical model rooted in CS and adapted for health research⁴. The ECC comprises six interrelated dynamics: representation, identity conceived as actant, regulation, production/counter-production, consumption, and sensoriality. These operate not as isolated categories but as articulated dimensions shaping how meanings circulate, stabilize, and are contested⁸. The model positions the researcher as an implicated interpreter, acknowledging situated and politically engaged knowledge production.
RESULTS:
The application of the ECC, guided by the articulating principles, reveals how health research simultaneously produces and silences meanings. It illuminates mechanisms through which certain practices gain legitimacy while relational, subjective, and ancestral dimensions of care remain underrepresented, affirming margins as spaces of knowledge production and re-existence⁹.
CONCLUSIONS:
The CS and the ECC offer an analytical lens for health research committed to epistemic justice, plurality, and integrality. By repositioning the researcher as an implicated interpreter, this approach calls on health research to listen to the margins as a political and epistemic commitment toward a more just and plural health.
| eISSN: | 2654-1459 |
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