Architects of Communication Scholarship

In this episode, Professor Edmund Lee interviews his former mentor, Professor K. Viswanath, on his life’s work in health communication research. Viswanath reflects on how communication evolved over the years from a divided discipline between critical communication scholars and social science researchers to an interdisciplinary and mixed methods research field. He also discusses his mentors, Phil Tichenor, George Donohue, and Clarice Olien, who established the knowledge gap hypothesis. Viswanath speaks on how his thinking about the knowledge gap hypothesis expanded to larger issues of communication resources: access to information as well as the ability to act on it. This led Professor Viswanath to develop a new framework called the structural influence model (SIM) of health communication which he expands on in this conversation.

 

Ellen Wartella

Edmund Lee

K. Viswanath

 

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor of Communication; Professor of Psychology, Human Development and Social Policy, and Medical Social Sciences

Northwestern University 

Director, Center on Media and Human Development

 

Assistant Professor, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Twitter: @EdmundWJLee

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmund-w-j-lee-4b02b915/

Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication

Harvard University and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Twitter: @vishplus

Instagram: @viswanathlabharvard

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/viswanathlab/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/k-vish-viswanath-913a9929

Dominic Bonelli

DeVante Brown