“Blind” contour drawing portraits made by HLTD54 students in Session 1, “Locating our Stories,” University of Toronto Scarborough, September 3 2019.
Welcome to the course blog for Toronto’s Stories of Health and Illness (HLTD54). This senior undergraduate Health Humanities seminar was designed by Prof. Andrea Charise in 2018 and runs at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
In Fall 2019 our blog will be updated on a weekly basis with content generated by HLTD54 students as part of our coursework. There you’ll find a range of critical, reflective, and creative posts and podcasts generated by HLTD54 students’ engagements with stories of health, illness, and disability that are in some way tied to Canada, the city of Toronto especially.
Posts will reflect our interest in questions like:
- How have realities of the Canadian healthcare setting impacted, or become implicated in, the telling of illness narratives?
- In the Canadian setting, whose stories of health and illness are written and read—and what narratives are celebrated, uncared for, or resisted?
- What might it mean to live with illness in what has been called the world’s most multicultural city?
This blog will be of interest to Health Humanities students (at the pre-health and health/medical professional level), educators, researchers, and anyone interested in the growth of Health Humanities in Canada. (Okay but . . . what is Health Humanities? Glad you asked. Check out SCOPE: The Health Humanities Learning Lab for an overview of this emergent interdisciplinary field.)
Big thanks to research assistant Stefan Krecsy, PhD Candidate in the University of Toronto’s Graduate Department of English, for assisting with background research and digital resource-gathering for this course.