Constituting Care: Relational Approaches to Health and Communication

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue of Healthcare, entitled “Constituting Care: Relational Approaches to Health and Communication”. Relational communication is a foundational yet often underexplored dimension of health and care. Moving beyond transactional or outcome-based models, this Special Issue centers communication as a dynamic, identity-shaping, and meaning-making process. Understanding how individuals negotiate care through interpersonal, family, institutional, and cultural relationships provides crucial insights into emotional and physical well-being, especially for marginalized and underrepresented populations.

In an era shaped by social inequality, technological change, and renewed attention to care infrastructures, it is vital to examine how communication practices construct, sustain, or challenge meanings of health and healing. This Special Issue aims to highlight the importance of viewing communication, not only as a tool within healthcare but as a constitutive force that shapes identities, relationships, and health outcomes.

This Special Issue aims to expand the scope of Healthcare by examining how care is enacted, negotiated, or resisted through communicative relationships. Aligned with the journal’s focus on interdisciplinary health research, this Issue invites authors to submit studies that explore care as a communicative and relational practice embedded in identity, embodiment, and social structures. Contributors may draw from interpersonal, family, institutional, organizational, or cultural perspectives and use a wide range of methodological approaches—including critical, qualitative, and autoethnographic methods—to investigate the relational dimensions of health and well-being.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews as well as compelling essays are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following areas:

• Explorations of care in family, romantic, or chosen relationships;
• Identity and embodiment in health interaction (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, age, ability);
• Experiences of health and illness in marginalized or underserved communities;
• Autoethnographic and narrative approaches to health and caregiving;
• Communication within care infrastructures and institutional systems;
• Critical or interpretive approaches to patient–provider interaction;
• Digital health communication, AI, and mediated care relationships;
• Reflexivity and relational ethics in health and caregiving research;
• Care as a practice of resistance, resilience, or identity negotiation;
• Constitutive communication theories and their application to health contexts.

Prof. Dr. Jimmie Manning
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.