NARRATIVE,HEALTH & SOC JUSTICE

Narrative medicine, its practice and scholarship, is necessarily concerned with issues of trauma, body, memory, voice, and inter-subjectivity. However, to grapple with these issues, we must locate them in their social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Narrative understanding helps unpack the complex power relations between North and South, state and worker, disabled body and able body, bread-earner and child-bearer, as well as self and the other (or, even, selves and others). If disease, violence, terror, war, poverty, and oppression manifest themselves narratively, then resistance, justice, healing, activism, and collectivity can equally be products of a narrative-based approach to ourselves and the world. This course explores the connections between narrative, health, and social justice. In doing so, it broadens the mandate of narrative medicine, challenging each of us to bring a critical, self-reflective eye to our scholarship, teaching, practice, and organizing. How are the stories we tell, and are told, manifestations of social injustice? How can we transform such stories into narratives of justice, health, and change?