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Selling Healing

Selling Healing

Selling Healing

Creative Arts and Health Communication in Ghana
Ama de-Graft Aikins, University College London
September 2025
Not yet published - available from September 2025
Hardback
9781009244435
£100.00
GBP
Hardback

    The intersections between arts, creativity and health are of significant importance in the humanities and social sciences. Arts and health research, for example, suggests that the arts offer participatory and transformational alternatives to traditional health communication. However, concepts and methods are predominantly informed by Global North research, and critical insights from arts traditions elsewhere remain to be fully integrated into common models. Ghana offers a unique case study for examining local and global dynamics in arts-based health communication, because of the country's rich art traditions as well as its place in global history and in the global imagination. Healing art forms like music and sculpture have evolved through intentional cross-cultural borrowings, as well as through changes imposed through slavery, colonialism and post-colonial political systems. Selling Healing tells a polyvocal story of how Ghanaian art forms intersect with health, illness and healing, inviting a re-imagining of health communication in global health.

    • Provides a template for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches to arts-based health communication, while acknowledging the specific concerns of advancing these projects in African contexts
    • Presents a wealth of data and sources including systemic reviews of past research, artist interviews, archival data, and public domain art works
    • Illustrated with numerous photos of art and art objects

    Product details

    September 2025
    Hardback
    9781009244435
    240 pages
    229 × 152 mm
    Not yet published - available from September 2025

    Table of Contents

    • List of figures, tables and boxes
    • Abbreviations
    • Acknowledgements
    • 1. Introduction: 'the gods may be considered patrons of the arts'
    • 2. If you sell your sickness you get a cure
    • 3. Mr wise and Mr foolish go to town
    • 4. All die (no) be die
    • 5. Food is medicine, food is poison
    • 6. Out of your mind
    • 7. We cannot eat stories
    • 8. Colonial virus
    • 9. Conclusions: “In Ghana here, you have to be creative to move ahead”
    • Appendix 1: map of Ghana, showing selected sites of arts-based health interventions
    • Appendix 2: interviews
    • Appendix 3: selected art forms: mural, songs, adverts, comedy sketches
    • References
    • Index.
      Author
    • Ama de-Graft Aikins , University College London

      Ama de-Graft Aikins is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Ghana Legon and a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. She was a British Academy Global Professor, based at University College London's Institute of Advanced Studies, between 2019 and 2023.