Post by HLTD50 student Riya Garcia The first film screened at this year’s International Health Film Series & Expo (IHFSE) at UTSC was a great hit. On March 1, 2018, the audience engaged in critical thinking about the multiple issues raised by this Toronto-based documentary. Faceless (2012) illustrates patients’ daily life experiences in an inpatient… Read More
Podcast and post by HLTD50 students Shining_Diamond_17 and hhhipster In this podcast, two HLTD50 students reflect on the novel Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez, and how it is indirectly a collection of stories of health and illness in Toronto. Click on the image below to listen:… Read More
Podcast and post by HLTD50 student KAKhalfan In this first episode of the KamKast, KAKhalfan recollects stories of his experiences as a first-generation Canadian transitioning between cultural expectations. Through discussing certain characters in Catherine Hernandez’s award-winning novel Scarborough, he connects aspects of their stories to those of the significant individuals within his own life. He… Read More
Post by HLTD50 student Kris In my investigative work as a health humanities student, I have witnessed countless representations of illness that have inspired my thinking. Using Arthur Frank’s teachings (click the “Arthur Frank” tag below or click here, here, or here for other summaries of Frank’s work on this blog) in order to begin… Read More
Post by HLTD50 student hhhipster Alex Boya’s short film Focus is a one-minute representation of the experience of attention deficit disorder (ADD) through the arts, specifically, through short film. From the aesthetic choice of animation and the way the audio and visual elements work together to make meaning, a lot of nuance can be understood… Read More
Post by HLTD50 student Skylight The voice of the ill person rests in the background of restitution and chaos narratives. However, the voice of the ill-person stands in the foreground of the quest narrative. I am most intrigued by what sociologist Arthur Frank calls “the quest narrative” because it is the only narrative style that… Read More
Post by HLTD50 student hhhipster In our first meeting for HLTD50, near the end of the seminar Professor Charise got us to participate in an activity that involved forming random pairs. Once in a pair, we were tasked with drawing our partner’s face within a given time limit (a couple of minutes), without looking down… Read More
Post by HLTD50 student Shining_Diamond_17 What is an outlier and what makes them so special? Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book Outliers, takes two definitional approaches to defining this term: In mathematics, an outlier is “a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.” In other words, it’s a point… Read More
Post by HLTD50 student KAKhalfan Traditionally, creativity has not been seen as a type of medical practice that could better the health outcomes of patients. Doctors have been traditionally recognized for their abilities to make decisions solely through their medical knowledge and experiences (Baruch, 2017). Through this recognition, patients relay their illness through means of storytelling;… Read More