Disability and Illness Narratives (CERT)

This course examines questions such as: What does the telling and reading of narratives do for the ill or disabled individual? How can clinicians effectively elicit, interpret, and act upon such narratives? Who owns a story, and what is the role of co-authorship, power and witnessing in story-telling and story-listening? Whose voice do we hear? What are the roles of power and hierarchy in story-telling and listening? What is the impact of familial, cultural, social, institutional, political contexts on the individual story? And finally, how can personal stories be translated to political advocacy and action? Texts assigned weekly will be broadly interdisciplinary – drawing from memoir, poetry, essays, fiction, feature and documentary films, narrative theory, and disability studies, exploring the relationship between disability/illness experience and narrative. This elective course is open to all students in the Narrative Medicine CPA program. Students should be prepared to engage with each other and with the instructor and to offer their questions, comments, insights, and analysis.

This is an essential, practically applied element of narrative medicine study and it is exemplary as a way to illustrate the impact of narrative study in shaping experience, opening awareness, and highlighting the need for change and new stories. A narrative medicine course focused on disability and illness narratives is an important aspect of narrative medicine study. Exploring narratives presented in a variety of formats by using narrative medicine methods can encourage deeper perspective-taking and promote activism for underrepresented voices.

Disability and Illness Narratives: Storytelling For Awareness and Activism is an elective course in the Narrative Medicine CPA program. In addition, this course is open to cross-registrants in other programs who demonstrate some understanding of narrative medicine and/or participate in the online asynchronous narrative medicine orientation course before the semester begins. Narrative Medicine CPA students are required to have completed, or be simultaneously enrolled in the course, Narrative Medicine Methods: Close Reading and Writing, course number K5120, and have completed the required program online asynchronous orientation course. CPA courses are all 10 weeks/modules long, and they are online and asynchronous, which means there are no meeting times. Each module represents one week of the course. All modules begin on a Tuesday and end on Monday of th