Background

Healthcare is often a form of translating patient symptoms into diagnoses, carrying with it both ambiguous terrain and surprises despite neoliberal medical systems aiming to fit patients into a “textbook.” We instead present a framework toward incorporating diasporic experiences into health humanities in care traditions, practices, and education—reflective about how our own (diasporic) positionalities and perspectives help us navigate not only neoliberal contexts but uncertainty within care contexts, rather than straightforward biomedical “matches.” As clinicians and educators, we put forth such experiences of humbling, belongingness, and navigating unfamiliar terrain—most pointedly aiming to demonstrate how our experiences and lenses can help those using health humanities recognize ambiguous conditions in healthcare practice and education as contexts requiring translation.

Acknowledging healthcare as a terrain full of constant new directions, our workshop employs narrative humility strategies to apply diasporic lenses toward diagnostic reasoning—which, as acts of translating symptoms, to diagnoses, to literacies, to treatments, highlight ambiguities within knowledge translation attempts. Following brief presentation and practice we will guide participants through production to consider their relationships to diaspora, with further encouragement toward reflection prior to paired or group sharing and discussion.

Objectives

Workshop participants will be guided to:
1. Describe diasporic senses within relationships to Land, patient communities, histories, and language use.
2. Apply reflections on diaspora toward educational and/or care practices.
3. Analyze advocacy potential generated through reflection in regard to one’s community, institution, and broader locales.

Associate Teaching Professor, Writing Studies and Health Humanities

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations