Intercultural Communication and Cancer

About the book

Overview and key argument

This book brings together five years of qualitative research with migrant women living with cancer in Hong Kong to examine how health, disease, and wellbeing are understood and communicated across cultures. At its centre are the stories of Filipino domestic workers — women who form one of Hong Kong's largest migrant communities — navigating breast cancer diagnoses, treatment decisions, and the experience of illness far from home, in a language not their own, in a healthcare system not designed for them.

The book argues that for these women, the cancer encounter is never simply a medical event. It is a site where culture, language, power, and belonging are negotiated simultaneously. A doctor's consultation becomes a space where assumptions about health literacy, patient compliance, and self-management collide with radically different understandings of the body, illness, kinship, and what it means to be unwell in a foreign country. Cancer, in this context, is not a universal experience transmitted through universal communication. It is a profoundly intercultural one.

Drawing on critical discourse analysis and intercultural communication theory, the book traces how kinship networks, storytelling practices, and collective memory shape responses to cancer diagnoses and treatment decisions in ways that are largely invisible to clinical providers. It examines how women maintain connections to home communities across distance; how remittance obligations shape decisions about whether and when to seek care; and how the experience of being a foreign body — racialised, classed, linguistically marginalised — intersects with the experience of having a body that is ill.

Key argument

The book's central argument is that health communication — including cancer communication — is intercultural communication, whether or not those involved recognise it as such. When healthcare systems treat communication as a neutral channel for biomedical information, they systematically fail the patients whose cultural frameworks differ from the implicit assumptions of those systems. Genuine improvement in cancer outcomes for migrant communities requires not just language services, but a fundamental reorientation of how healthcare communication is understood, trained, and practised.

Research basis

The book draws on five years of empirical research, including:

• In-depth qualitative interviews and narrative analysis with Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers with cancer in Hong Kong
• Community-based collaborative fieldwork developed in partnership with migrant workers' organisations
• Analysis of clinical and organisational communication practices in Hong Kong's healthcare system
• Research published in Qualitative Health Research (2024), Social Science & Medicine (2025), Journal of Migration and Health (2025), and the International Journal for Equity in Health (2026)

Anticipated impact

The book speaks to researchers in health communication, applied linguistics, migration studies, and public health; to clinicians and health educators; to policymakers and advocates working on migrant health equity; and to the growing international literature on cancer disparities.

It contributes to ongoing policy conversations about multilingual healthcare, the rights of migrant workers to equitable healthcare access, and the role of language and culture in cancer outcomes. Its publication by Cambridge University Press places it within one of the world's leading scholarly communication channels in the social sciences and humanities.

Related publications

• 2026
  Journal Article

  'What would happen if I die in a foreign country?': Indonesian migrant domestic workers' experiences of personal uncertainty with cancer

  Neupane, M., Oktavianus, J. & Turnbull, M.

  International Journal for Equity in Health

• 2025
  Journal Article

  Cancer as communication work: A qualitative study of Filipino migrant domestic workers with cancer in Hong Kong

  Turnbull, M., Neupane, M. & Oktavianus.

  Social Science & Medicine, 118477

• 2025
  Journal Article

  Navigating migration and cancer in Asia: A narrative analysis of stories told by Filipino migrant domestic workers with breast cancer

  Turnbull, M. & Wu, X.

  Journal of Migration and Health, 100337

• 2024
  Journal Article

  "We need to go back home (to) the Philippines healthy": An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of migrant domestic workers' experiences of having breast cancer in Hong Kong

  Turnbull, M., Yu, C. & Tay, D.

  Qualitative Health Research, 10497323241228789

• 2026
  Book Chapter — Forthcoming

  Making sense of breast cancer and migration: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis

  Turnbull, M., Yu, C. & Tay, D.

  In K. Kondo et al. (Eds.), Discourses of Inclusive and Exclusionary Health Communication. Routledge.