International Sexual Health Promotion Network

Pei Soo Ang is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, with research interests in health discourses, visual communication, critical discourse analysis and disability studies.  Her work on Malaysian contraceptive promotional materials, conducted with Fauziah Taib and Theo van Leeuwen earned the Best Paper award at the 2021 National Population and Family Development Conference. In 2023, an article on fear-based messaging in multimodal adolescent SRHR communication was published in Visual Communication and later presented at the 2025 ASEAN University Network SAFE Reproductive Health Conference in Bangkok. It generated strong interest from health practitioners in Southeast Asia and led to an invitation to collaborate with Indonesia’s Angsamerah Institution and Foundation to analyse reflections written by adolescents participating in a puberty education program in Jakarta. Her current research integrates her expertise in disability studies and SRHR, advocating for inclusive, accurate and holistic visual representations of disabled individuals within the Malaysian context.

Deborah Bateson is Professor of Practice at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she leads a program of research and research implementation in sexual and reproductive health. The main focus of her current work, supported by large grants from the Australian Department of Health and the Minderoo Foundation, is in the area of cervical cancer elimination. It includes optimising the cervical screening participation of people with mental disability precancers, and working with partner Ministries of Health in Vanuatu, Timor Leste, Samoa, the Islands, Papua New Guinea, Tuvula and Fiji to provide in-country clinical sexual and reproductive health leadership training for Obstetrics and Gynaecology Fellows across three key elements of cervical cancer elimination: HPV vaccination, HPV screening and treatment of precancers, and treatment and palliative care for invasive cancers. Throughout her career she has been motivated to help achieve equal access to sexual and reproductive health care for all women.

Carole Jepsen is a language consultant at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research is rooted in social semiotics and multimodal critical discourse analysis with a focus on digital communication and inequality in health. Recent publications include the articles ‘Misconceptions: a multimodal study of Danish contraception information’ (2023) with Nina Nørgaard and ‘Healthcare in the hand: Patients’ use of handheld technology in video consultations with their general practitioner’ (2022). Together with Nina Nørgaard and Theo van Leeuwen, she edited a special issue of Visual Communication on “Visuals in Sexual Health Promotion” (2023).

Cindie Aaen Maagaard is Associate Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. Her work focuses on the use of narrative in organisational and institutional contexts with a focus on health communication, including patients’ and health professionals’ sense-making of illness, communication between health professionals and patients, and narrative medicine in education and practice. In addition to multiple collaborations with nurses and physicians, Cindie works with multimodal representations, the negotiation of narrative authority, and sexual health communication as the head of work packages in Ignorance and inequality in sexual health – a multimodal perspective, a major research project funded by the Velux Foundation.

Dang Thanh Diem is a PhD candidate and a Lecturer in English at Hoa Lu University in Vietnam. Her research interests lie at the intersection of multimodality, discourse analysis and public health communication, with a particular focus on the multimodal representation of social actors in infographics.  She is especially drawn to issues of mental health, sexual health and reproductive health, and how these are communicated visually and textually in both English and Vietnamese contexts. Diem adopts a multimodal approach in her work, analysing the interplay of language, visuals and layout to understand how meanings are constructed, and power relations are represented. She has presented her research at several national and international conferences.  Her motivation stems from a deep commitment to making health information more inclusive and accessible through critical engagement with visual and verbal representations. She hopes her work can contribute to better understanding and improvement of public health communication, particularly for marginalised communities.

Fauziah is an independent researcher as well as a consultant with AD Success Consulting, Malaysia. She was previously a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya. Her research interests focus on multimodality, health discourses, business communication and ethnolinguistics. She has published articles in Visual Communication, Corporate Communication and International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and book chapters on endangered languages in Malaysia. Her work on multimodal communication in Malaysian health promotion materials on contraception, carried out with Pei Soo Ang and Theo van Leeuwen, was awarded the Best Paper presentation at Malaysia’s National Population and Family Development Conference in 2021. Another research publication resulted in the publication of ‘Fear Generation in the Multimodal Communication of Sexual and Reproductive Health oi Malaysian Adolescents’ in a special issue of Visual Communication (2022). Currently she is engaged in research about the dissemination of sexual and reproductive health information to persons with disability in Malaysia.

Georgia Carr is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Communication in Healthcare (IC) at the Australian National University, where she is currently working on a project examining end-of-life care. Her research areas are functional linguistics, educational linguistics and health literacy, with a focus on sex education, health and media. In her doctoral research, she analysed the teaching practices of sex education, as described in her book The Language of Sex Education: With Respect to Consent (Routledge, 2025). Her previous sex education research includes a linguistic analysis of Dolly Doctor advice columns looking at how sex education advice for young women has changed in the last 25 years. Other past research projects include analysis of diabetes reporting in the news, Aboriginal English in the media and the language of climate change. A list of publications is available at georgiacarr.co/publications.

Gwen Bouvier is a Professor at Shanghai International Studies University, where she is part of the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications. Her research focuses on digital communication and civic debate on social media, employing critical discourse analysis, multimodality and online ethnography. She serves as Associate Editor for Social Semiotics and Book Review Editor for Discourse & Society.  She has an extensive publication record, with recent work exploring HPV policy, communication, gender politics and cancel culture. Her book Qualitative Research Using Social Media (Routledge, 2022) highlights her expertise in analysing digital communication.  Given her interest in debate on social media, she is motivated to engage with health communication due to its intersection with public debate, cultural taboos and the nature of representation of social issues online. The politicisation of gender and identity in online spaces, as seen in her work on gender solidarity and cancel culture, tells of a broader interest in how sexual health discussions in digital contexts sustain inequality and power in society.

Maryam Ghiasian is an Associate Professor in Linguistics and Persian Language at the Payame Noor University Tehran, Iran, where her research currently focuses on multimodal critical discourse analysis, multimodal health communication and multimodal discourses of the environment and architecture, and includes working with graphic designers to improve the efficiency of images in school textbooks and environmental advertisements. In past research she has applied systemic-functional linguistics to the Persian language and applied social semiotics to help readers interpret posters, brochures and other multimodal texts. Recent work includes ‘Visual Representation of Menopause in Iran’ published in Visual Communication (2022), and a collaboration with the  ‘PanMeMic’ research team during Covid 19, resulting in ‘PanMeMic: Insights from a collective, multimodal research method on changes in communication and interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond’, co-authored with Ana Pedrazzini, Clarice Gualberto, Styliani Karatza and Elisabetta Adami, and published in Trends and Challenges in Contemporary Multimodality Studies in International Contexts (Routledge, 2023).

Nina Nørgaard is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Southern Denmark, where she also leads the research group Multimodality, Language and Organisation. Her current research focuses on social semiotics, multimodal critical discourse analysis, multimodal health communication and multimodal sustainability communication. She also has research interests in multimodal stylistics and the semiotics of architecture. Together with Carole Jepsen and Theo van Leeuwen, she edited a special issue of Visual Communication, titled Visuals in Sexual Health Promotion (2023). She is Principal Investigator of Ignorance and Inequality in Sexual Health – A Multimodal Perspective, a major research project funded by the Velux Foundation. From a multimodal perspective, the project investigates how public health information about sexual health is communicated to different population groups in Denmark. Nina is currently involved in work on communication about menopause, sexual health and disability, and sexual health information for senior citizens.

Oluwabunmi Opeyemi Oyebode is a Reader in the Department of English and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Obafemi Awolowo University, in Il-Ife, Nigeria. She was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, a Guest Researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, and a recipient of the prestigious African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellowship.  Her research interests include (Multimodal) Discourse Analysis (on which she has co-authored two books in Nigeria), New Media Communication and Applied Linguistics. Her work focuses on the critical analysis of the visual elements of multimodal texts, and seeks to investigate how visuals, like language, are strategically employed as rhetorical tropes and discourse constructs to project specific ideological stances that will resonate with target audiences. Her work has been published in Discourse & Communication, Discourse & Society, Discourse Studies, Discourse and Interaction, Journal of Pan African Studie, Metaphor & Symbol, Visual Communication and Communication and the Public.

Sasja Krogh Laursen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture and Language at the University of Southern Denmark. She is part of the “Ignorance and Inequality in Sexual Heath – A Multimodal Perspective” project funded by the Velux Foundation. Her research investigates the discourses present in existing communication about menopause in Denmark, specifically she focuses on how menopause is represented across various genres, including self-help literature, official healthcare materials, images from image banks and AI-generated visualisations. Her work examines the communicative choices made in these texts and how they are constructed, as well as how the communicative work is carried out through the different semiotic modes (i.e., language, image, typography, colour, layout, etc) – and in combination. She aims to uncover the meanings of these texts and how they can unintentionally result in misunderstandings and potential biases.

Solveig Ilhéa Pees is a PhD candidate at the Department of Culture and Language at the University of Southern Denmark. She is currently working on a project examining sexual consent, which is part of the Velux Foundation-funded project Ignorance and inequality in sexual health – a multimodal perspective. Her research interests include multimodal critical discourse analysis, health communication, and discourses of sustainability. Her doctoral research examines how information regarding sexual consent is communicated visually and verbally in a Danish context. Specifically, the project explores how non-profit organisations communicate about sexual consent on Instagram, how fictional works portray sexual consent, and how recent sexual education materials convey the concept of sexual consent. Earlier research has investigated social media communication focused on corporate sustainability.

Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Honorary Professor at the University of New South Wales and the Australian Catholic University. He is widely published in the areas of critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and multimodal communication, and particularly known for Discourse and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Reading Images – The Grammar of Visual Design (Routledge, 2021 [1996]) co-authored with Gunther Kress, of which a fourth edition is currently in preparation. In recent years his research has focused on semiotic technology, organisational communication and the use of visual communication in health promotion. Throughout his career he has sought to combine theory and practice in his research and teaching, and to create collaborations with practitioners working in the fields he has been researching.

Wenting Zhao is a PhD student at Örebro University, Sweden. She studies sexual health marketing on social media, focusing on influencer videos carried by popular hashtags which provide sexual health expertise and offer commercial solutions to target audiences. Her work investigates how key aspects of women’s sexual health, including risk and responsibility, sexuality and relationships, are shaped by platform technologies and commercial logics. She has recently presented her research at an international conference on HPV. Currently she studies influencer videos, focusing on the discourses about sexual identity they carry and the way these are curated to women from different marketing segments, and asking questions about the kinds of identities they make available or deny to women from different marketing segments.  In future publications, she aims to focus on healthisation in the Chinese social media market, specifically Xiaohongshu (RedNote) as a major commercial lifestyle platform in China.