What the papers say: Reading therapeutic landscapes of women's health and empowerment in Uganda

The Ugandan Ministry of Health emphasises the pivotal position of women in securing the nation's health. Drawing on the concept of therapeutic landscapes, this paper explores media constructions of health in Uganda in order to question what role these may play in creating or undermining a ‘therapeutic landscape’ which supports women's empowerment in a health context. The paper argues for the importance of understanding discursively constructed notions of health in order to ground the promotion of a health care strategy in the everyday lives and discourses of the users implicated. Given the Ugandan government's current drive to both empower women and push an agenda of formally provided health care, this paper provides an exploratory analysis of how far newspapers facilitate or hinder this vision.