Book contents
- Selling Healing
- Selling Healing
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures, Tables and Boxes
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Frontispiece
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 If You Sell Your Sickness You Get a Cure
- Chapter 3 Mr Wise and Mr Foolish Go to Town
- Chapter 4 All Die (No) Be Die
- Chapter 5 Food Is Medicine, Food Is Poison
- Chapter 6 Out of Your Mind
- Chapter 7 We Cannot Eat Stories
- Chapter 8 Colonial Virus
- Chapter 9 Conclusions
- Book part
- References
- Index
Chapter 8 - Colonial Virus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2025
Book contents
- Selling Healing
- Selling Healing
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures, Tables and Boxes
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Frontispiece
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 If You Sell Your Sickness You Get a Cure
- Chapter 3 Mr Wise and Mr Foolish Go to Town
- Chapter 4 All Die (No) Be Die
- Chapter 5 Food Is Medicine, Food Is Poison
- Chapter 6 Out of Your Mind
- Chapter 7 We Cannot Eat Stories
- Chapter 8 Colonial Virus
- Chapter 9 Conclusions
- Book part
- References
- Index
Summary
During the first year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Ghana’s creative arts communities captured its complex facets through various art forms. In Chapter 8, I focus on how these spontaneous artistic responses afforded the opportunity to examine in real time how grassroots arts and bottom-up social responses to health crises influenced health communication. Artists channelled ‘creative practices of the imagination’ regarding COVID-19, highlighting a mutually constitutive relationship between lay responses to the pandemic and what artists produced. The COVID arts they produced functioned in three arts and health domains: health education and knowledge production, disease prevention, and (indirectly) contributing to COVID-19 policy development. These intersecting functions converged on the science, culture and politics of COVID-19. I outline the subtle and radical ways artists translated the science, culture and politics of the COVID-19 pandemic to Ghanaian communities at home and abroad. I reflect on the insights these new art forms present for health communication during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
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- Selling HealingCreative Arts and Health Communication in Ghana, pp. 131 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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