Article Summary by Deborah Lupton This article reports the findings of a study using an innovative approach to understanding people’s beliefs and practices: the story completion method. This method asks people to complete story ‘stems’, writing about a fictional character. The completed narratives are then analysed for the shared cultural norms and discourses they revealed. […]
Latest articles
No Words: A Virtual Choir of Healthcare Workers Memorializes 500,000 Americans Lost to the Pandemic
Announcement by The Nocturnists The U.S. has reached half a million deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic. To mark this moment, The Nocturnists medical storytelling community has created No Words, a video memorial honoring those lost to the pandemic and the healthcare workers who cared for them. No Words Memorial Video: https://bit.ly/TheNocturnists_NoWords No Words Webpage: https://thenocturnists.com/no-words […]
Women, the State and Film Activism
Film Festival Announcement by Khalid Ali The 25th Human Rights Watch Film Festival, UK Digital Edition, Barbican Cinema On Demand, 18–26 March 2021, https://ff.hrw.org/london Reproductive rights and the right to family, survivors of rape and access to healthcare are the focus of several documentaries in the 25th edition of Human Rights Watch Film Festival taking place from 18-26 March, presented exclusively on the […]
The Space Between Words: On the Description of Parkinson’s Disease in Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Corrections’
Article Summary by Ben Rutter and Rodney Hermeston Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) is one of the most prominent novels to feature a character with Parkinson’s Disease. In this paper we look at the language used by Franzen to capture Parkinson’s Disease and to describe the protagonist Alfred Lambert. We use linguistic analysis to consider […]
‘This Place Is Not for Children Like Her’: Disability, Ambiguous Belonging and the Claiming of Disadvantage in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Article Summary by Michelle Botha and Brian Watermeyer This paper explores ideas about disability, identity and belonging in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. The first author (MB) reflects on the intersection of disability, gender, race and language in her experience. The paper revolves around MB’s recollection of her first year of primary school which […]
Eggs, Sugar, Grated Bones: Colour-Based Food Preferences in Autism, Eating Disorders, and Beyond
Article Summary by Mattias Strand This article explores colour-based food preferences and selective eating, with a focus on autism spectrum disorder and so-called avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID)—an eating disorder characterized by restrictive eating in the absence of body image concerns. As many parents can testify, it is immensely common for children to display patterns […]
What is the Cultural Value of Dying in an Era of Assisted Dying?
Article Summary by Naomi Richards and Marian Krawczyk Assisted dying—the ability to be assisted by a medical professional to end your life at a time of your choosing – is now available in a number of jurisdictions around the world, for those who satisfy the criteria. This paper raises the question of whether dying will […]
Trauma–Aware Care
Blog by Lily Kim While chairing Holocaust Education Week (UJA Federation) and leading Equity for the Canadian Disability Studies Association (CDSA), I recognized the need to reconcile diverse intersectional perspectives in Canada. The current situation is widely viewed as a healthcare crisis brought about by the COVID-19 virus. However, the pandemic has revealed the existential […]
Bringing Narratives from Physicians, Patients and Caregivers Together: A Scoping Review of Published Research
Article Summary by Tracy Moniz Article by Tracy Moniz, John Costella, Maryam Golafshani, Chris Watling and Lorelei Lingard What can we learn from research that compares the stories that physicians, patients, and family caregivers write about their illness and care experiences? Our literature review sought to answer this question in hopes that a better understanding […]
Crisis
Blog by D. Brendan Johnson Medicine is at home among crises. Hippocrates, or one of his disciples, in the Corpus Hippocraticum was one of the first to conceptualize a crisis as a medical reality, and it was a concept upon which Galen would build and thereby preserve for 1500 years. For these classical physicians, the […]