Re-Imagining Health in Immersive Media Environments

Undergraduate / Graduate

Virtual Reality (VR) as a storytelling medium is often discussed in terms of immersion and presence, and, since the early 2000s, regarding how these media-specificities tend to instill greater empathy in participants. In this course, we will critically examine the potential and specifics of VR and other immersive technologies like games to tell stories of illness and debility. Using concepts from critical disability studies, phenomenology, narrative medicine, and media theory, we will learn to distinguish the roles that VR illness narratives offer their participants, ranging from being a witness to others' stories to becoming the first-person experiencer of non-normative embodiments. Questions are: what are the limitations of focusing on empathy in VR illness narratives? What alternatives do new illness narratives in VR offer that help to critically reflect on binaries between healthy/ill, and able/disabled? How can we use our own lived experience to critically reflect on ableism in everyday representations? Each week, we will focus on particular health issues as they are taken up in the arts and critically reflected in theory. E.g., we delve into the ways VR artists represent blindness or offer multisensory and nonlinear stories to give a sense of the ups and downs of living with bipolar disorder. The literature provided each week will help guide us through the exploration of these VR experiences. We will also try out some of these VR experiences ourselves.