Boxed Out: Disability, Health Communication, and the Boundaries of Disciplinary Knowledge

This study asks where disability perspectives are situated within health communication research and what it would take to make them central rather than peripheral. We conducted a scoping review of core and adjacent health communication journals using title and abstract searches for keywords "disability" or "disabled," with no date limits. Across 469 items, about 27.6% explicitly name disability in titles/abstracts, and publication is concentrated in a small subset of outlets. Keyword profiling shows clinical and management terms outweigh access- and justice-oriented language, indicating that disability is most often framed as a problem to be corrected rather than as knowledge to be centered. Based on these findings, we argue for a paradigm shift: treat disability perspectives as foundational to theory, method, and practice in health communication. Concretely, journals should reward access/rights language in titles and abstracts; require or encourage positionality, demographic detail, and participation/co-production reporting; and explicitly welcome participatory, ethnographic, rhetorical, and design approaches alongside interventions. These structural changes would improve discoverability and accountability, widen who counts as a knower, and align research practices with accessibility and equity goals, moving disability from managed object to coauthored perspective.