TORONTO’S STORIES OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS (Winter 2018)
This seminar is organized by three integrated thematic modules:
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- Module 1: Radical Listening (Weeks 1-3)
- Module 2: Witness and Testimony (Weeks 4-8)
- Module 3: Makers and Making (Weeks 9-12)
Week 1 (January 10, 2018): Locating Our Stories
“Blind” contour drawing portraits made by HLTD54 students in Session 1, “Locating our Stories,” University of Toronto Scarborough (Jan.10, 2018).
Required:
- Baruch, “Doctors as Makers”
- de Leeuw et al, “Going Unscripted: A call to critically engage storytelling methods and methodologies in geography and the medical-health sciences”
- Digital Alchemists & the Center for Solutions to Online Violence (CSOV), “Research Ethics for Students & Teachers: Social Media in the Classroom”
- Benson and Reyman, “Learning to Write Publicly”
- Metis in Space (a.k.a. Chelsea Vowel), “Commencing the Podcast Invasion,” Parts 1-4 (NB: all four parts are essential preparation for your podcast)
Optional:
- Koch, “Storytelling: Is it Really Research?”
- Charon, “What is Narrative Medicine?” (Chapter 1, Narrative Medicine)
- Projects: “Journeys to Health”; “Faces of Healthcare”; UTSC’s “#silenceisviolence”, “The 7024th Patient”
- Black, “What is a Face?”
Week 1’s in-class writing prompt, following a “blind” contour drawing exercise in pairs:
Write about the experience of drawing your partner’s face.
Week 2 (Jan.17): (Digital) Storytelling for Health
Required:
- Chika Stacy, “Woman, Black”
- Kabeer, “Too Depressed to go to Class Today: Surviving Academia With Depression”
- Tysdal, “A MAD Fold-in Poem”
- Depression Quest (Twine game; play a few rounds before seminar)
- de Jager et al, “Digital Storytelling in Research: A Systematic Review”
Optional:
- Fletcher, “Digital Storytelling and Implicated Scholarship in the Classroom”
- Sample digital story-telling methods (incl. DigEm, StoryCenter, Twine tutorials)
Week 2’s in-class writing prompt, following our viewing of Yung Chang’s digital short “Brave Overseas“:
Tell me the story of your name.
Week 3 (Jan.24): Ethics of Health (and) Storytelling
Required:
- Garden, “Who Speaks for Whom?: Health humanities and the ethics of representation”
- El-Hadi, “Death Undone”
- Gubrium et al, “A Situated Practice of Ethics for Participatory Visual and Digital Methods in Public Health Research and Practice”
- Rice et al, “Project Re•Vision: Disability at the Edges of Representation” (*please watch videos)
Optional:
- Bailey, “#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics”
- Ellis, “Compassionate Research: Interviewing and Storytelling from a Relational Ethics of Care”
- The Next Day (animated interactive documentary; strong content warning regarding first-person recollections of suicidal ideation and attempts, abuse, addiction, and intergenerational trauma. Take care.)
- Sample research ethics statements (incl. Montreal Life Stories)
Week 3’s in-class writing prompts:
Write about a time you felt listened to. (beginning of seminar)
Write about a time you didn’t listen well enough. (end of seminar)
Week 4 (Jan.31): Team 1 Seminar Presentation: “The Body’s Problem with Illness – Restitution Narratives”
Required:
- Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Chaps. 2, 4
- Creative text (chosen by Team 1): SickKids VS Limits
Optional:
- Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: both Prefaces, Chap. 8
Week 5 (Feb.7): Team 2 Seminar Presentation: “Witnessing the Call of Illness – Chaos Narratives”
Required:
- Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Chaps. 1, 3, 5
- Creative text (chosen by Team 2): Alex Boya’s “Focus” (short film)
Optional:
- Lam, “Contact Tracing” (short story), from Bloodletting and Other Miraculous Cures
Week 6 (Feb.14): Team 3 Seminar Presentation: “Testimonies of Illness – Quest Narratives”
Required:
- Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Chaps. 6, 7
- Creative text (chosen by Team 3): Gina Nicholl’s “Travels to the Psych Ward: A Story of Comfort and Grief” (short memoir)
Optional:
- Meredith, “Mortal Selfies”
Week 6’s in-class writing prompt, following our reading and discussion of Rupi Kaur‘s poem “Fingers“:
Tell me about your scars.
February 21: Reading Week (no classes)
Week 7 (Feb.28): Team 4 Seminar Presentation: “Beyond the Single (Illness) Story – Hernandez’s Scarborough“
Required:
- Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Afterword
- Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story”
- Creative text: Hernandez, Scarborough: A Novel
Week 8 (Mar.7): In-class visit by Lisa Boivin, Indigenous bioethicist and artist
Required:
- Boivin, “Painting the Path of Indigenous Resilience”
- Selections from Ars Medica (2015): Crawford & Richardson; Boivin; Wastasecoot; Crow
- “Calls to Action,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Optional:
- Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (esp. Chapter 8, “Twenty-Five Indigenous Projects”)
Week 9 (Mar.14): In-class visit by Catherine Hernandez, author of Scarborough: A Novel
Required:
- Hernandez, Scarborough: A Novel
Week 10 (Mar.21): In-class Final Project Workshop: Group 1
Note: On March 23-24th, 2018, we will be working with Project Re*Vision’s REDLAB (see Week 3’s readings above) for a two-day Digital Storytelling Workshop at UTSC. We are SO EXCITED to be partnering with the University of Guelph’s state-of-the-art mobile media lab to create final projects for our seminar!