Stories of Illness: Graphic & Narrative Medicine

Catalog description

Narrative holds a place in discourses of health, illness, caregiving, and disability, carrying and conveying the densely detailed, nuanced, and complex threads of personal emotion, social experience, and cultural meaning that accompany all instances of these subjects. Narrative also plays a growing role in clinical practice, research, and health education, as increasingly registered in the burgeoning field of Medical Humanities. This course introduces students to texts, practices and major works in the emergent fields of Graphic Medicine and Narrative Medicine, using traditional humanities methods of critical reading and analysis as well as experimental and creative methods including field observation and art-making in a variety of media. Building upon a series of practice-based assignments throughout the semester, students will complete a final project that exemplifies some of the ways narrative and graphic design foster understanding and knowledge in contexts of illness.