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Community engagement is heralded as a panacea for the inherent political challenges of public health governance. For COVID-19 vaccination planning in the United States, appeals for community engagement emerged in response to the disproportionate mortality and morbidity burdens on marginalized groups and as a bulwark against a political climate of vaccine hesitancy, scientific disinformation, and mistrust of public health. In this article, we use a culture-centered analytical framework to critique the discursive construct of “community” within public health documents that discuss community engagement strategies for COVID-19 vaccination. Through a critical-abductive analysis of more than 400 state public health department documents, we recognized the diverse axes on which appeals to the community are framed. Our findings show that the construct of “community” refers to both a material/tangible space marked by discursive struggle and one containing a moral economy of responsibility. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of conceptualizing community in these ways.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen, naturally occurs in the groundwater in large parts of West Bengal, a state in eastern India. Communities that depend on groundwater face twice the lifetime mortality risk for cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and developmental disorders. This study, focused on arsenic-affected communities in the state of West Bengal, offers an initial exploration of how local stakeholders construct groundwater arsenic as a health problem. Arsenic remediation interventions involve a host of international, regional, and local stakeholders (public health departments, government engineers, community health workers, consultants, hydrologists, etc.). How an environmental health problem is constructed has implications for who is considered responsible, what causes it, and pertinently, how/whether affected communities participate in addressing the problem. Drawing from a culture-centered approach, this fieldwork-based study offers three distinct yet related problem construction discourses, viz. social/political, technical and personal, in how the problem of arsenic is construed locally, and how such discourses are related to a particular conceptualization of community participation in environmental health.