Intercultural Health Communication

Cultural Lenses and Shared Horizons (CLASH), a theory for intercultural health communication, addresses limitations of existing approaches by conceptualizing communication as a contextually situated and locally managed activity. By examining intercultural tensions in health contexts, the Element shows how meaning, ethics, and decision-making are constituted through communicative practices across legal, policy, community, and interpersonal levels. CLASH presents four frameworks-Magic Consciousness, Mythic Connection, Perspectival Thinking, and Integral Fusion—to explain and predict how different forms of cultural consciousness shape experiences of reality and the evaluation of communicative practices within and across specific communities. Emphasizing the dynamic and emergent nature of social interactions, CLASH provides an analytical framework to examine how participants recognize, negotiate, and reconcile divergent cultural frameworks. By conceptualizing culture as an ongoing process embedded in social contexts, CLASH offers a regenerative paradigm for analyzing intercultural health communication. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.