Conclusion
The concluding chapter revisits the key themes of the book and reflects on them in light of the prospects for “narrative public health.” The significance of narrative and its mediations for a global public emergency and the more general turn to narrative in health communications, can be construed as the formation of a narrative public health. We reflect on how these uses of narrative are more or less undertaken at face value, without some of the benefits to be found in critical scholarship on narrative. The chapter argues therefore for a reassertion of the narrative’s potential for critical reflection on how life can be lived, and the salience it may have for health crisis. A keynote of this chapter is the critical reflexivity exhibited in the persuasion narratives constructed by publics to explain their engagements with the emergence of a pandemic threat in their life worlds.