Just Walk/Walk with a Doc: Organizing for Health

My dissertation project examines how participants and healthcare providers create meanings about health in an integrative healthcare program called, Just Walk/Walk with a Doc. Founded in 2005 by a local Cardiologist, JW is an organization that brings together healthcare professionals and community members to encourage healthy lifestyle behaviors while engaging in the exchange of health information. There is a need to attend to how participants of the JW program make sense of and socially construct their health concerns and appreciations outside of institutionalized establishments.;To position my descriptions, I draw upon phenomenology and pragmatism philosophies with a feminist approach. In doing so, I argue that we must attend to ways of being (e.g. embodied presence), doing (e.g. practical experiences), and becoming (e.g. a reflexive dimension rendered from the interplay of being and doing) to understand meanings we create about who we are as a healthy person and what we do in order to maintain our healthcare practices. Further, I suggest that health communication scholars explore embodiment as it complements the spoken word in health promotional campaigns. In this way, we are more able to attend to how embodied cues as well as discourse offer us insights into health values that underlie meanings and behaviors that we attribute to our health experiences. My methodological approach aligns with these efforts to emphasize embodiment in health campaigns as I describe how ethnography served as my guide to attend to and interpret interactions that occurred at the JW program.;My ethnographic descriptions and reflections led me to explore answers to the following questions: 1.) How does storytelling in the Just Walk/Walk with a Doc program become meaningful? 2.) In what ways does culture inform meanings we create about our health in the Just Walk/Walk with a Doc program? 3.) In what ways does the Just Walk/Walk with a Doc program reproduce, disrupt, and/or redefine power within physician-participant/patient relationships? I conclude this dissertation by offering how what is learned can be embraced by, transformative for, and transferable to other healthcare movements.