This interdisciplinary and inter-institutional seminar explores the connection between narrative, health, and social justice. If disease, violence, terror, war, poverty, and oppression all manifest themselves in narrative, then it is equally true that resistance, justice, healing, activism, and collectivity can be products of a narrative-based approach to ourselves and the world. Narrative understanding helps unpack the complex power relations from the macro level between the resource rich and resource deprived, global allies and global antagonists, state and worker, disabled body and able-body, bread-earner and child-bearer, subject and researcher, patient and provider, as well as to the individual level of self and the other. The seminar will draw from such fields as journalism, performance arts, law, public health, trauma studies, anthropology, sociology, literary studies, medicine, writing, and cultural studies. The common thread will be the narratives we tell as individuals, families, communities, and nations that situate our experience in social, political, and cultural contexts, and that express in so many ways our search for justice in our world and for our world. Our aim is to broaden the mandate of each of our disciplines, challenging each of us to bring a critical, self-reflective eye to our scholarship, teaching, practice, and organizing through discussion, dialogue, interview, art making, introspection, and collaboration. As we explore concepts and lived experiences of privilege, power, access, vulnerability, and otherness, we expand our shared understanding of the intertwined realities of health, narrative, and social justice. How are the stories we tell manifestations of social injustice? How can we transform such stories into narratives of justice, health, and change to empower new voices and strategies to emerge as means towards advocacy and engagement?
