Title: The emergence of health literacy interventions.

Preferred format: Individual presentation

Overview: Health literacy encompasses knowledge, understanding, and access to and control of
resources that promote and maintain satisfactory health and wellbeing. Crucial in the areas of
health promotion, health protection, disease prevention, healthcare maintenance and system
navigation, health literacy is the outcome of such diverse abilities as reading, writing, numeracy,
the ability to access information, and critical thinking.

This paper provides a critical analysis of the diverse rhetorical strategies utilized by various
health actors to alter, hybridize, and modify spoken, written, and digital genres relevant to health
literacy interventions. It will examine how the genres are manipulated to accord with the various
social contexts where the interventions occur. It places particular emphasis on health literacy
interventions targeted toward populations identified as particularly prone to poor health literacy
such as the unemployed, the elderly, and immigrants.

This paper argues that health literacy interventions that position culture as a fixed entity rather
than a fluid, dynamic process evolving over the life-course are compromised.