Translating critical public health

One of the abiding challenges of engaging critically with public health practice is speaking across disciplinary lines. I ask critical public health scholars to consider the technologies and practices that may render their ideas inaccessible to others, while also exploring the importance of retaining those practices. I propose that if critical scholars must take seriously health promotion's focus on knowledge translation (KT) to rethink their own forms of communication, they will need to find strategies for doing so without compromising key aspects of their work. Although KT is praised for its paradigm-shifting break from knowledge transfer, it still involves conceptualizing knowledge as a commodity to be packaged for application. Nonetheless, a creative engagement with KT may be possible. Drawing on Emily Apter's complementary and contradictory theses - 'Nothing is translatable' (xi) and 'Everything is translatable' (xii) - I suggest a new direction for thinking through the impossible and imperative task of translating critical public health scholarship.