| Description |
With the present study, I aim to address three major areas that, to date, have been infrequently studied on their own terms, and not at all in conjunction with one another: (1) health and identity, (2) health counseling as a topic of health communication, and (3) the counselor's subjectivity within the counseling context. Extant literature on health counseling posits both counselor and client identities as binary and static and fails to account for, much less endorse or cultivate, the complexity and nuance that characterize the health-counseling situation. I seek to trouble these assumptions and contribute to new ways of thinking about health counseling by focusing this study on an AIDS foundation to assess how counselor and client identities are respectively positioned and how counselors perceive their own and clients' identities, as well as how counselors accomplish particular subjectivities in fluid, dynamic, and complex ways. In order to accomplish this, I utilize a combination of theoretical approaches, including critical, rhetorical, and poststructural, and a range of textual and qualitative methods. This study suggests that not only do counselors perform myriad and multifaceted identities during counseling, even in a context that prescribes rigid positionalities, but that these practices may be a valuable resource for effective health-counseling practices. |
