ESC # 23 Workshop “Narrative Medicine: Stories in Health Care”

ENROLLMENT DEADLINE IS MAY 26th

Date: 2-3 June [14h-18h]
Venue: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa
Organização: ULICES

Enrollment Form

Abstract: This is a two-part seminar exploring why patients and healthcare workers need to tell stories and why offering healthcare is a narrative activity. It also offers guidelines as to how health care professionals may listen better to the stories they hear in their medical practices.

Seminar 1: The Dialogical Turn: 15 Guidelines for Studying Stories. After almost 15 years of workshops on narrative analysis, I have refined my own approach into fifteen guidelines–not rules, and not a procedure for narrative analysis, but guidelines to preserve what is always at least a three part dialogue between storyteller, story, and listener/analyst. These guidelines point toward two core research questions: (1) What are selves? Or in a dialogical sense, what are the multiple voices that make up a self? and (2) On what basis do people affiliate into groups, and what holds groups together? Stories are understood to be central to both selves and group affiliations.

Seminar 2: Why Healthcare Needs Stories. The seminar will begin with basic propositions about why offering healthcare is a narrative activity: why patients need to tell stories, why healthcare workers needs their own stories, and why healthcare systems need to take stories seriously. We will then consider both methodology and clinical issues: how to listen to stories, what could be useful to write about stories, and how to lead people to question whether the stories that frame their experiences are good stories with which to live.

Trainers: Arthur W. Frank*
Language: English
Dates: 2-3 June, 14h-18h
Fee: 80 € (students / ULICES: 40 €)
Enrollment Deadline: May 26th
*ARTHUR W. FRANK is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. His first book was a memoir of his own experience with illness: At the Will of the Body (1991). He then wrote a study on how people narrate their own illnesses, The Wounded Storyteller (1995), complemented by a volume on the ethics of clinical relationships, entitled The Renewal of Generosity (2004). His most recent work is Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology (University of Chicago Press, 2010). In 2014 he will give invited lectures in Sweden, Norway, England, Spain, Portugal, and will also be Resident Fellow in Canadian Studies at UCLA. His interests include Narrative Bioethics, Clinical Education, and Healthcare practice, especially end-of-life care.