Seminars
Narrative, Health, and Social Justice
Year Founded 2010
Seminar # 737
StatusActive
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?
Chair/s
Mario de la Cruz
Zahra Khan
Rapporteur/s
Khalid Antonio Taylor
External Website
Conference Registration
Meeting Schedule
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Past Meetings
Scheduled
Faculty House
From Burnout to Thriving: Barriers to Recruitment and Field Longevity
Speaker/s
Janice Haskins, American Psychological Association (APA)
Lisa Haileselassie, Panelist
Bianca Jones Marlin, Panelist
Ovita Williams, Panelist
Abstract
For our April 2026 meeting, the University Seminar on Narrative, Health, and Social Justice at Columbia will be reintroducing its annual symposium session. This year's title is “From Burnout to Thriving: Interrogating Systemic Barriers to Recruitment and Field Longevity" Our featured speaker will be Janice Haskins, PhD, Head of the Leadership Development Institute at the American Psychological Association (APA). She will be giving a talk on barriers to recruiting mental health care providers of color into under-resourced communities and service areas. Dr. Haskins will bring an organizational psychology lens to this timely conversation on resources, infrastructure, service provision, and community health. After the talk there will be a panel discussion with expert guests about self-care and burnout prevention needs and strategies for providers of color who may be overburdened because of the systemic barriers that impact recruitment, education, and training efforts. An interactive Q&A with the audience will close the session.
Scheduled
Faculty House
Abstract
For our inaugural spring seminar session we will be joined by Donna Bulseco, Editor in Chief of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, to discuss the new collection, Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine (2026). As part of a moderated discussion, Donna will share insights about the process of bringing these pieces from the digital space into physical print. She will also present contributors who will read work from this debut anthology and engage in dialogue about the importance of reflective writing practices, representation of the voices in healthcare, and the opportunities present in engaging with the experiences of others through literature. Where It Hurts offers a glimpse into the daily realities of those charged with taking care of us at our most vulnerable. In raw and revealing essays, stories, and poems, from doctors, nurses, EMTs, therapists, and more, we hear what it’s like to deal with difficult patients, life-changing diagnoses, private doubts, painful failures, and the victories that keep them going.
Scheduled
Faculty House
The Grammar of Care: Integrating Narrative Medicine into a Pediatric Health System
Speaker/s
Nicole Robinson
Abstract
As a poet, scholar, and researcher, Nicole Robinson will be discussing her work at the intersections of palliative care and art, sharing insights from her experiences building a narrative medicine program in a clinical setting and leading growing research projects related to narrative and pediatric critical care. She is the Narrative Medicine Program Manager at Akron Children's Hospital, teaches at Northeast Ohio Medical University, and is the author of Without a Field Guide (Unbound Edition Press), a finalist for the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Robinson's expertise will focus our conversation, and we invite folks to engage in an intimate Q&A at the end of the session.
Scheduled
Faculty House
Mirrors and Doorways: Theater as a Vehicle for Exploring the Past and Present
Speaker/s
Renée Saindon Russas, Actor, Classically Trained Vocalist, and Director
Abstract
A conversation with Renée Saindon Russas, director of the upcoming play, These Shining Lives. The play revolves around the real-life circumstances of women in the 1920s who worked in a watch factory, painting watch dials with glowing radium-rich paint. While the characters and company in the play are based on six historical figures in Ottawa, IL, over 4,000 factory workers would succumb to the effects of radium poisoning. Upon learning their condition was fatal, instead of fading into the background, these women decided to risk their names, images, and reputations and take the watch company to court six times over the 1930s in search of justice for their bodies, families, and workplace conditions for those who came after them. This legal battle would ultimately lead to the formation of OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration we know today. Renée will discuss the relevance of theatrical works based on non-fictional and historical narratives to contemporary issues of social justice, health, and advocacy.
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