Communicating Care

Catalog description

Communicating Care ENGL 162N / SOC 162N / CAS 162N What do we talk about when we talk about health? Our states of well-being and illness are topics that, like the weather, drive our daily conversations, but we rarely have time to study and practice these vital exchanges. Spoken in emergency rooms or on long-distance calls, by medical professionals, family members, or strangers making small talk, the languages we use to share pain and recovery require our knowledge of long-established scripts and our willingness to improvise. By exploring how these encounters draw from and work as textual and dramatic performances, this course will guide students to achieve a new level of literacy in the most essential communicative art of caring. Students will analyze health conversations in literary texts, such as short stories, poems, memoirs, and graphic novels. They will explore real-life scenarios drawn from their own experiences, fieldwork, social science theories, and published case studies. Developing skills in the humanities (GH), they will see how subjective, often individual experience, historical perspectives, and creative expression help people to communicate about health and care. Developing their abilities in the social and behavioral sciences (GS), they will see how theory provides insights to predict and understand health and practices of care, investigate objective perspectives and recognize the contributions of fieldwork and data-driven studies to analyzing and improving communication when health is a main concern. They will integrate these methodologies especially to pursue these fields' common goals of making beneficial connections between individuals and groups, and managing private and public life.