HLTB50: INTRODUCTION TO HEALTH HUMANITIES
Fall 2018 | Mondays 3.00-5.00 pm, HW216| Tutorials on Tuesday afternoons (NB: enrolment is mandatory)
Professor A. Charise
[email protected]| Office phone: 416. 208. 4786
Office Hours: Mon/Wed 12-2pm, PO-106 Office #11 (in the portable behind MW Bldg)
Course
Description
This course is an introduction to Health Humanities, a new interdisciplinary field of
study that explores human health and illness through the creative arts and humanities.
Using a range of materials drawn from humanistic disciplines (including literature,
film, visual and performing arts), this course will provide you with the tools needed to
critically explore person-centred stories of health, illness, and disability. Lectures,
tutorials, and assignments will help you to 1) build practical vocabularies and
transferable analytical skills, and 2) reflect critically upon the role of the creative arts
and humanities in health-related topics including: narratives of disease and illness,
personhood and embodiment, representations of disability, mental illness, patient-
professional relationships, and death and dying. Key subtopics such as ability, gender,
race, sexuality, class, therapy, and pain will provide common threads that weave
together diverse artistic representations of human health and illness with the shifting
historical contexts of research and policy.
Success in this course is contingent upon your coming to class and completing
the readings and assignments with care. Although you may find the materials
challenging at times, they’re worth it—I promise. HLTB50 is designed to draw
connections with other disciplinary understandings of similar topics that you will study
(or may have already studied) in other courses; this course is also the core course of
UTSC’s new Health Humanities Minor (Canada’s first! see www.scopelab.ca for more
details) and a prerequisite for all upper-year Health Humanities classes. As a result of
completing this course, students from any discipline will be uniquely prepared to
confront the complex ambiguities of health in the public sphere—as intellectually
rigorous, creative and, perhaps above all, empathetic evaluators.
Tutorials
All HLTB50 students MUST ALSO ENROL in a Tuesday afternoon tutorial.
Texts
1) Required (available at UTSC Bookstore/Library course reserves)
• Health Humanities Reader, eds. Jones, Wear, Friedman (Rutgers, 2014)
• Additional materials and links via Quercus under “Modules”
2) Recommended (available at UTSC Bookstore/Library course reserves)
• The Broadview Guide to Writing, Babington et al (Broadview, 2015)
Evaluation
(see Quercus
under “Syllabus”
for additional
details)
10%
15%
25%
10%
5%
35%
Due Date:
Week 03, 05, 09
Week 06
Week 11
Ongoing; begins Week 02 (Sept.18)
Ongoing
TBA by Registrar’s Office
!
2
Learning
Objectives
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
• Define the major features of the interdisciplinary field called Health Humanities;
• Describe how humanistic perspectives inform the critical study of health and
illness using a diverse range of relevant questions, methods, and examples;
• Demonstrate engagement with the major debates and concerns of Health
Humanities through assignments aimed at building critical vocabularies and
practical skills in close reading, visual and textual literacy, narrative competence,
the ethics of representation, reflective and critical writing;
• Show enhanced critical capacity in both oral and written forms of expression, and
apply that enhanced analytical rigour to the ethical and existential issues at the
basis of individual experiences of health, illness, and disability;
• Appraise the value of the humanities as a means of understanding the multi-
dimensional, interdisciplinary nature of human health—in professional settings,
scholarly contexts, and in your own lived experience as a health care consumer
and potential patient.
Resources
& Policies
Readings: All “Required” materials listed beside a specific date must be
read for the class that meets on that date. “Optional” readings are exactly that;
you will find these selections useful 1) for bringing additional context to lectures, 2) as
practical examples of arts-based health research/policy, or 3) as assignment resources.
Quercus: Please check Quercus and your UTSC email account regularly for course
documents, announcements, correspondence, discussion boards, and links to online
resources. Abridged lecture slides will be posted weekly by Thursday. Quercus
participation activities will be posted weekly under “Discussion Board.”
Assignment Submission and Late Policies: Assignments must be submitted to
your TA in person at the beginning of your assigned Tuesday tutorial. Assignments
may be submitted up to one week late with the automatic loss of one point per day, to
a maximum of seven points (e.g., 67% to 60%); late assignments will not receive
written comments. Assignments will not be accepted beyond one week after the due
date without documented evidence of a major disruption to your work (see
“Verification of Student Illness or Injury Form” on Quercus under “Syllabus”). All
work, including quizzes, will be returned in tutorials. There are NO make-up quizzes.
Office Hours & Email Policy
Office hours are dedicated to you, dear students: please make use of them
to discuss the course, your progress, and other thoughts related to your university
studies. If you must email with course-related questions, please
1) reconsider, 2) consult the syllabus, then, if absolutely necessary, 3) contact
your TA prior to contacting me. Remember that emails are a formal genre of
writing and self-presentation—be polite and professional at all times. Course-related
emails will generally be replied to within 48 hours, weekends excepted.
Academic Integrity and Plagiarism
Academic integrity is essential to the pursuit of learning and scholarship in a
university, and to ensuring that a degree from the University of Toronto is a strong
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signal of each student’s individual academic achievement. The University treats cases
of cheating and plagiarism very seriously. The University of Toronto’s Code of
Behaviour on Academic Matters http://www.governingcouncil.utoronto.ca/policies/behaveac.htm outlines the
behaviours that constitute academic dishonesty and processes for addressing academic
offences. Even if you think you know what academic dishonesty means, be
proactive and read “How not to Plagiarize” on Quercus under “Syllabus.”
Normally, students will be required to submit their course essays to
Turnitin.com for a review of textual similarity and detection of possible plagiarism. In
doing so, students will allow their essays to be included as source documents in the
Turnitin.com reference database, where they will be used solely for the purpose of
detecting plagiarism. The terms that apply to the University's use of the Turnitin.com
service are described here: http://www.sgs.utoronto.ca/Documents/TurnItIn-Guide.pdf
AccessAbility Services
Students with diverse learning styles and requirements are welcome in this course. If
you have a disability or health consideration that may require accommodation, please
feel free to approach me and/or the AccessAbility Services Office as soon as possible. I
will work with you and AccessAbility Services to ensure you can achieve your learning
goals in this course. Enquiries are confidential. UTSC AccessAbility Services staff
(S302; 416.287.7560 or [email protected]) are available by appointment to
assess specific needs, provide referrals, and arrange appropriate accommodations.
Schedule
Required Reading
(HHR: Health Humanities Reader; Q: Quercus)
Optional
(periodically updated;
see course emails)
Important
Dates
Week 1
Lecture: Sept. 10
Why do the arts and humanities
enhance the study of health?
HHR: Introduction
Q: Crawford, “Health Humanities”
Q: Trautmann,
“Literature and
Medicine”;
Charise, “Site, Sector,
Scope”
MODULE 1: TELLING STORIES
Week 2
Lecture: Sept. 17
How do we learn to live with illness?
HHR: Chapters 1, 4
HHR: Chap. 15
Tutorials begin
Tuesday Sept. 18
Week 3
Lecture: Sept.24
What does language reveal about health
care relationships?
HHR: Chapters 13, 8, 11
Q: Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor” (excerpt)
HHR: Chap. 12, 41
Q: McDonald, “The
Politics of Disease”;
Stacy, “Woman,
Black” (spoken word
poetry)
Quiz 1 (students
can ONLY write
quizzes in their
enrolled tutorial)
MODULE 2: IMAGINING PAIN
Week 4
Lecture: Oct. 1
How does narrative remodel the
experience of mental illness?
HHR: Chapter 31
Q: Wallace, “The Depressed Person”
HHR: Chap. 25
Q: Jiang, “Have You
Been Bothered…”;
Quinn, “Depression
Quest” (online RPG)
!
4
Oct.8
No Lecture or Tutorial– UTSC Reading Week
Week 5
Lecture: Oct.15
Why is pain so hard to communicate?
HHR: Chapters 16, 34
Q: Getsi, “Letter”;
Neilson, “Pain as
Metaphor”; Wallace,
“Incarnations”
Quiz 2 (students
can ONLY write
quizzes in their
enrolled tutorial)
Week 6
Lecture: Oct.22
What do comics teach us about health
and sexuality?
HHR: Chapters 22, 19
HHR: Chaps. 20, 21
Q: Councilor, “Dear
Doctor I”
Assignment 1
Due (in tutorial)
MODULE 3: BODIES ON STAGE
Week 7
Lecture: Oct.29
How can the arts help remedy health
inequities?
HHR: Chapter 26, 24
Q: Noone, “Conversations In The Dark”
Q: Heck, “The
Enemy”;
Downie, “The Secret
Path”
Week 8
Lecture: Nov.5
When is health care like a dramatic
performance?
HHR: Chapter 35, 18
HHR: Chap. 42
Q: Lam, “Take All of
Murphy”
Week 9
Lecture: Nov.12
How does disability influence creative
expression?
HHR: Chapter 6, 43
HHR: Chap. 5
Q: Peace, “Head
Nurses”;
“Dear Everybody”
Quiz 3 (students
can ONLY write
quizzes in their
enrolled tutorial)
MODULE 4: PRESERVING PERSONHOOD
Week 10
Lecture: Nov.19
Can personhood persist when
memory fails?
HHR: Chapters 29, 30
Q: Karasik, “Mine”
(former UofT
student); Walrath,
“Aliceheimer’s”
(excerpt)
Optional field
trip (free!):
Tangled Art +
Disability Gallery,
401 Richmond St.W
(date/time TBA)
Week 11
Lecture: Nov.26
What is a good death?
HHR: Chapter 10
Q: Donne, “Death Be Not Proud” (poem)
In-class film screening and discussion: Wit
HHR: Chaps. 9, 37
Q: Lorde, “Today Is Not
The Day”; Uppal,
“Another Dysfunctional
Cancer Poem”
Assignment 2
Due (in tutorial)
Week 12
Lecture: Dec. 3
Conclusion and In-class Exam Prep
HHR: Chapter 45
Q: Rankine, “The Health of Us”
HHR: Chap. 39
Final Exam date
TBA by Registrar