Story-telling for Health: Acknowledgment, Expression, and Recovery (SHAER)

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Global Health is an interdisciplinary field that requires the integration of lived experiences and narratives into health discourses. The premise of SHAER is to establish a theoretical platform for the development of story-telling interventions in Global Health. SHAER is embedded into the meanings of health and suffering related to distress and disease from various contexts that are the landscape of global health research and practice such as health system development, humanitarian health efforts, conflict and disaster settings, and the universal human right to health and justice. The concept of SHAER has been developed as part of a research collaboration with an international network to develop a traditional story-telling trauma therapeutic intervention for gender-based violence and conflict-related trauma. Collective collaborations from trauma studies, psychiatry, literature, political and social science, philosophy and ethics produced a manual for a storytelling intervention in Afghanistan, Kashmir Valley, and Turkey, which embodied storytelling traditions and cultural histories of what a story means and who are the storytellers. This course will foster the principles and premises through which SHAER are founded on, namely the need to create spaces for marginalised narratives through humanities-based methodologies to improve global health practice and research, including other relevant health fields such as medicine. The course offers the pedagogical aspect of the theoretical frameworks of storytelling and narratives from literary perspectives. Another important aspect of the course is the learning of skills related to health interventions. Through a collaboration with an arts foundation, the students will learn how to propose and form a storytelling intervention. Students shall have the opportunity to choose a particular cultural context of their interest and form a student engagement activity through the facilitation of the arts foundation, Invisible Flock, and to apply the theoretical knowledge to an applied aspect of global health.